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HOME  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
OF  MODERN  KNOWLEDGE 

No.  61 

Editor  is 

HERBERT    FISHER,  M.A.,  F.B.A. 
PROF.  GILBERT   MURRAY,  Lrrr.D., 

LL.D.,  F.B.A. 

PROF.  J.  ARTHUR   THOMSON,  M.A. 
PROF.  WILLIAM   T.  BREWSTER,  M.A. 


THE  HOME  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
OF  MODERN  KNOWLEDGE 

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LITERATURE  AND  ART 

Already  Published 

"SHAKESPEARE By  JOHN  MASEFIELD 

ENGLISH    LITERATURE- 
MODERN  By  G.  H.  MAIR 

LANDMARKS     IN     FRENCH 

LITERATURE By  G.  L.  STKACHEY 

ARCHITECTURE By  W.  R.  LETHABY 

ENGLISH    LITERATURE- 
MEDIEVAL  By  W.  P.  Ker 

THE   ENGLISH   LANGUAGE  .  .  By  L.  PEARSALL  SMITH 
GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS  .  By  W.  P.  TRENT  and  JOHW 

EBSKINE 

Future  Issues 

THE  WRITING  OF  ENGLISH  .  By  W.  T.  BREWSTER 
ITALIAN  ART  OF  THE  RENAIS- 
SANCE   By  ROGER  E.  FRY 

GREAT  WRITERS  OF  RUSSIA  .  By  C.  T.  HAGBEET  WRIGHT 
ANCIENT  ART  AND  RITUAL  .  By  Miss  JANE  HARRISOK 
THE  RENAISSANCE  „..-...  By  MRS.  R.  A.  TAYLOR 


THE  VICTORIAN  AGE 
IN  LITERATURE 

BY 
G.  K.  CHESTERTON 


NEW  YORK 
HENRY  HOLT  AND   COMPANY 

LONDON 
WILLIAMS   AND   NORGATE 


THE  UNIVERSITY  PRESS,  CAMBRIDGE,   U.S.A. 


College 

Library, 


CONTENTS 

CHAP.  PAGE 

INTRODUCTION 7 

I    THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE  AND  ITS  ENEMIES  .  12 

II    THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS 90 

III  THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS 156 

IV  THE  BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE 204 

BlRLIOORAPHICAL  NOTE    .........  253 

INDEX    ,                                                                      ,  255 


1528072 


THE  Editors  wish  to  explain  that  this  book 
is  not  put  forward  as  an  authoritative  history 
of  Victorian  literature.  It  is  a  free  and  per- 
sonal statement  of  views  and  impressions 
about  the  significance  of  Victorian  literature 
made  by  Mr.  Chesterton  at  the  Editors' 
express  invitation. 


VI 


THE  VICTORIAN  AGE  IN 
LITERATURE 

INTRODUCTION 

A  SECTION  of  a  long  and  splendid  literature 
can  be  most  conveniently  treated  in  one  of 
two  ways.  It  can  be  divided  as  one  cuts 
a  currant  cake  or  a  Gruyere  cheese,  taking 
the  currants  (or  the  holes)  as  they  come. 
Or  it  can  be  divided  as  one  cuts  wood — along 
the  grain:  if  one  thinks  that  there  is  a  grain. 
But  the  two  are  never  the  same:  the  names 
never  come  in  the  same  order  in  actual  time 
as  they  come  in  any  serious  study  of  a  spirit 
or  a  tendency.  The  critic  who  wishes  to 
move  onward  with  the  life  of  an  epoch,  must 
be  always  running  backwards  and  forwards 
among  its  mere  dates;  just  as  a  branch  bends 
back  and  forth  continually;  yet  the  grain 


8    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

in  the  branch  runs  true  like  an  unbroken 
river. 

Mere  chronological  order,  indeed,  is  almost 
as  arbitrary  as  alphabetical  order.  To  deal 
with  Darwin,  Dickens,  Browning,  in  the 
sequence  of  the  birthday  book  would  be  to 
forge  about  as  real  a  chain  as  the  "Tacitus, 
Tolstoy,  Tupper"  of  a  biographical  diction- 
ary. It  might  lend  itself  more,  perhaps,  to 
accuracy:  and  it  might  satisfy  that  school  of 
critics  who  hold  that  every  artist  should  be 
treated  as  a  solitary  craftsman,  indifferent  to 
the  commonwealth  and  unconcerned  about 
moral  things.  To  write  on  that  principle  in 
the  present  case,  however,  would  involve  all 
those  delicate  difficulties,  known  to  politi- 
cians, which  beset  the  public  defence  of  a 
doctrine  which  one  heartily  disbelieves.  It  is 
quite  needless  here  to  go  into  the  old  "art  for 
art's  sake" — business,  or  explain  at  length 
why  individual  artists  cannot  be  reviewed 
without  reference  to  their  traditions  and 
creeds.  It  is  enough  to  say  that  with  other 


INTRODUCTION  9 

creeds  they  would  have  been,  for  literary 
purposes,  other  individuals.  Their  views  do 
not,  of  course,  make  the  brains  in  their  heads 
any  more  than  the  ink  in  their  pens.  But  it 
is  equally  evident  that  mere  brain-power, 
without  attributes  or  aims,  a  wheel  revolving 
in  the  void,  would  be  a  subject  about  as 
entertaining  as  ink.  The  moment  we  differ- 
entiate the  minds,  we  must  differentiate  by 
doctrines  and  moral  sentiments.  A  mere 
sympathy  for  democratic  merry-making  and 
mourning  will  not  make  a  man  a  writer 
like  Dickens.  But  without  that  sympathy 
Dickens  would  not  be  a  writer  like  Dickens; 
and  probably  not  a  writer  at  all.  A  mere 
conviction  that  Catholic  thought  is  the  clear- 
est as  well  as  the  best  disciplined,  will  not 
make  a  man  a  writer  like  Newman.  But 
without  that  conviction  Newman  would  not 
be  a  writer  like  Newman;  and  probably  not  a 
writer  at  all.  It  is  useless  for  the  aesthete  (or 
any  other  anarchist)  to  urge  the  isolated 
individuality  of  the  artist,  apart  from  his 


10    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

attitude  to  his  age.  His  attitude  to  his  age 
is  his  individuality:  men  are  never  individual 
when  alone. 

It  only  remains  for  me,  therefore,  to  take 
the  more  delicate  and  entangled  task;  and 
deal  with  the  great  Victorians,  not  only  by 
dates  and  names,  but  rather  by  schools  and 
streams  of  thought.  It  is  a  task  for  which 
I  feel  myself  wholly  incompetent;  but  as  that 
applies  to  every  other  literary  enterprise  I 
ever  went  in  for,  the  sensation  is  not  wholly 
novel:  indeed,  it  is  rather  reassuring  than 
otherwise  to  realise  that  I  am  now  doing 
something  that  nobody  could  do  properly. 
The  chief  peril  of  the  process,  however,  will 
be  an  inevitable  tendency  to  make  the  spirit- 
ual landscape  too  large  for  the  figures.  I  must 
ask  for  indulgence  if  such  criticism  traces  too 
far  back  into  politics  or  ethics  the  roots  of 
which  great  books  were  the  blossoms;  makes 
Utilitarianism  more  important  than  Liberty  or 
talks  more  of  the  Oxford  Movement  than 
of  The  Christian  Year.  I  can  only  answer 


INTRODUCTION  11 

in  the  very  temper  of  the  age  of  which  I 
write:  for  I  also  was  born  a  Victorian;  and 
sympathise  not  a  little  with  the  serious 
Victorian  spirit.  I  can  only  answer,  I  shall 
not  make  religion  more  important  than  it 
was  to  Keble,  or  politics  more  sacred  than 
they  were  to  Mill. 


CHAPTER  I 

THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE  AND  ITS  ENEMIES 

THE  previous  literary  life  of  this  country 
had  left  vigorous  many  old  forces  in  the 
Victorian  time,  as  in  our  time.  Roman 
Britain  and  Mediaeval  England  are  still  not 
only  alive  but  lively;  for  real  development  is 
not  leaving  things  behind,  as  on  a  road,  but 
drawing  life  from  them,  as  from  a  root.  Even 
when  we  improve  we  never  progress.  For 
progress,  the  metaphor  from  the  road,  implies 
a  man  leaving  his  home  behind  him:  but 
improvement  means  a  man  exalting  the 
towers  or  extending  the  gardens  of  his  home. 
The  ancient  English  literature  was  like  all  the 
several  literatures  of  Christendom,  alike  in  its 
likeness,  alike  in  its  very  unlikeness.  Like 
all  European  cultures,  it  was  European;  like 

all  European  cultures,  it  was  something  more 
12 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     13 

than  European.  A  most  marked  and  un- 
manageable national  temperament  is  plain  in 
Chaucer  and  the  ballads  of  Robin  Hood;  in 
spite  of  deep  and  sometimes  disastrous 
changes  of  national  policy,  that  note  is  still 
unmistakable  in  Shakespeare,  in  Johnson  and 
his  friends,  in  Cobbett,  in  Dickens.  It  is 
vain  to  dream  of  defining  such  vivid  things; 
a  national  soul  is  as  indefinable  as  a  smell, 
and  as  unmistakable.  I  remember  a  friend 
who  tried  impatiently  to  explain  the  word 
"mistletoe"  to  a  German,  and  cried  at  last, 
despairing,  "Well,  you  know  holly — mistle- 
toe's the  opposite!"  I  do  not  commend  this 
logical  method  in  the  comparison  of  plants  or 
nations.  But  if  he  had  said  to  the  Teuton, 
"Well,  you  know  Germany — England's  the 
opposite" — the  definition,  though  fallacious, 
would  not  have  been  wholly  false.  England, 
like  all  Christian  countries,  absorbed  valuable 
elements  from  the  forests  and  the  rude 
romanticism  of  the  North;  but,  like  all 
Christian  countries,  it  drank  its  longest 


14    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

literary  draughts  from  the  classic  fountains 
of  the  ancients:  nor  was  this  (as  is  so  often 
loosely  thought)  a  matter  of  the  mere 
"Renaissance."  The  English  tongue  and 
talent  of  speech  did  not  merely  flower  sud- 
denly into  the  gargantuan  polysyllables  of  the 
great  Elizabethans;  it  had  always  been  full  of 
the  popular  Latin  of  the  Middle  Ages.  But 
whatever  balance  of  blood  and  racial  idiom 
one  allows,  it  is  really  true  that  the  only 
suggestion  that  gets  near  the  Englishman  is 
to  hint  how  far  he  is  from  the  German.  The 
Germans,  like  the  Welsh,  can  sing  perfectly 
serious  songs  perfectly  seriously  in  chorus: 
can  with  clear  eyes  and  clear  voices  join 
together  in  words  of  innocent  and  beautiful 
personal  passion,  for  a  false  maiden  or  a  dead 
child.  The  nearest  one  can  get  to  defining 
the  poetic  temper  of  Englishmen  is  to  say 
that  they  couldn't  do  this  even  for  beer. 
They  can  sing  in  chorus,  and  louder  than 
other  Christians :  but  they  must  have  in  their 
songs  something,  I  know  not  what,  that  is  at 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     15 

once  shamefaced  and  rowdy.  If  the  matter 
be  emotional,  it  must  somehow  be  also  broad, 
common  and  comic,  as  "  Wapping  Old  Stairs" 
and  "Sally  in  Our  Alley."  If  it  be  patriotic, 
it  must  somehow  be  openly  bombastic  and, 
as  it  were,  indefensible,  like  "Rule Britannia" 
or  like  that  superb  song  (I  never  knew  its 
name,  if  it  has  one)  that  records  the  number 
of  leagues  from  Ushant  to  the  Scilly  Isles. 
Also  there  is  a  tender  love-lyric  called  "O 
Tarry  Trousers"  which  is  even  more  English 
than  the  heart  of  The  Midsummer  Night's 
Dream.  But  our  greatest  bards  and  sages 
have  often  shown  a  tendency  to  rant  it  and 
roar  it  like  true  British  sailors;  to  employ  an 
extravagance  that  is  half  conscious  and  there- 
fore half  humorous.  Compare,  for  example, 
the  rants  of  Shakespeare  with  the  rants  of 
Victor  Hugo.  A  piece  of  Hugo's  eloquence  is 
either  a  serious  triumph  or  a  serious  collapse: 
one  feels  the  poet  is  offended  at  a  smile.  But 
Shakespeare  seems  rather  proud  of  talking 
nonsense:  I  never  can  read  that  rousing  and 


16    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

mounting  description  of  the  storm,  where  it 
comes  to — 

"Who  take  the  ruffian  billows  by  the  top, 
Curling  their  monstrous  heads,  and  hanging 

them 

With  deafening  clamour  in  the  slippery 
clouds." 

without  seeing  an  immense  balloon  rising 
from  the  ground,  with  Shakespeare  grinning 
over  the  edge  of  the  car,  and  saying,  "You 
can't  stop  me:  I  am  above  reason  now." 
That  is  the  nearest  we  can  get  to  the  general 
national  spirit,  which  we  have  now  to  follow 
through  one  brief  and  curious  but  very 
national  episode. 

Three  years  before  the  young  queen  was 
crowned,  William  Cobbett  was  buried  at 
Farnham.  It  may  seem  strange  to  begin 
with  this  great  neglected  name,  rather  than 
the  old  age  of  Wordsworth  or  the  young 
death  of  Shelley.  But  to  any  one  who  feels 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     17 

literature  as  human,  the  empty  chair  of 
Cobbett  is  more  solemn  and  significant  than 
the  throne.  With  him  died  the  sort  of 
democracy  that  was  a  return  to  Nature,  and 
which  only  poets  and  mobs  can  understand. 
After  him  Radicalism  is  urban — and  Toryism 
suburban.  Going  through  green  Warwick- 
shire, Cobbett  might  have  thought  of  the 
crops  and  Shelley  of  the  clouds.  But  Shelley 
would  have  called  Birmingham  what  Cobbett 
called  it — a  hell-hole.  Cobbett  was  one  with 
after  Liberals  in  the  ideal  of  Man  under  an 
equal  law,  a  citizen  of  no  mean  city.  He 
differed  from  after  Liberals  in  strongly  affirm- 
ing that  Liverpool  and  Leeds  are  mean  cities. 
It  is  no  idle  Hibernianism  to  say  that 
towards  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century 
the  most  important  event  in  English  history 
happened  in  France.  It  would  seem  still 
more  perverse,  yet  it  would  be  still  more 
precise,  to  say  that  the  most  important  event 
in  English  history  was  the  event  that  never 
happened  at  all — the  English  Revolution  on 


18    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

the  lines  of  the  French  Revolution.  Its 
failure  was  not  due  to  any  lack  of  fervour 
or  even  ferocity  in  those  who  would  have 
brought  it  about:  from  the  time  when  the 
first  shout  went  up  for  Wilkes  to  the  time 
when  the  last  Luddite  fires  were  quenched  in 
a  cold  rain  of  rationalism,  the  spirit  of  Cob- 
bett,  of  rural  republicanism,  of  English  and 
patriotic  democracy,  burned  like  a  beacon. 
The  revolution  failed  because  it  was  foiled 
by  another  revolution;  an  aristocratic  revolu- 
tion, a  victory  of  the  rich  over  the  poor.  It 
was  about  this  time  that  the  common  lands 
were  finally  enclosed;  that  the  more  cruel 
game  laws  were  first  established;  that 
England  became  finally  a  land  of  landlords 
instead  of  common  land-owners.  I  will  not 
call  it  a  Tory  reaction;  for  much  of  the  worst 
of  it  (especially  of  the  land-grabbing)  was 
done  by  Whigs;  but  we  may  certainly  call  it 
Anti-Jacobin.  Now  this  fact,  though  politi- 
cal, is  not  only  relevant  but  essential  to  every- 
thing that  concerned  literature.  The  upshot 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     19 

was  that  though  England  was  full  of  the 
revolutionary  ideas,  nevertheless  there  was 
no  revolution.  And  the  effect  of  this  in  turn 
was  that  from  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth 
century  to  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth  the 
spirit  of  revolt  in  England  took  a  wholly 
literary  form.  In  France  it  was  what  people 
did  that  was  wild  and  elemental;  in  England 
it  was  what  people  wrote.  It  is  a  quaint 
comment  on  the  notion  that  the  English  are 
practical  and  the  French  merely  visionary, 
that  we  were  rebels  in  arts  while  they  were 
rebels  in  arms. 

It  has  been  well  and  wittily  said  (as  illus- 
trating the  mildness  of  English  and  the 
violence  of  French  developments)  that  the 
same  Gospel  of  Rousseau  which  in  France 
produced  the  Terror,  in  England  produced 
Sandford  and  Merton.  But  people  forget  that 
in  literature  the  English  were  by  no  means 
restrained  by  Mr.  Barlow;  and  that  if  we 
turn  from  politics  to  art,  we  shall  find  the 
two  parts  peculiarly  reversed.  It  would  be 


20    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

equally  true  to  say  that  the  same  eighteenth- 
century  emancipation  which  in  France  pro- 
duced the  pictures  of  David,  in  England 
produced  the  pictures  of  Blake.  There  never 
were,  I  think,  men  who  gave  to  the  imagina- 
tion so  much  of  the  sense  of  having  broken 
out  into  the  very  borderlands  of  being,  as 
did  the  great  English  poets  of  the  romantic 
or  revolutionary  period;  than  Coleridge  in 
the  secret  sunlight  of  the  Antarctic,  where  the 
waters  were  like  witches'  oils;  than  Keats 
looking  out  of  those  extreme  mysterious  case- 
ments upon  that  ultimate  sea.  The  heroes 
and  criminals  of  the  great  French  crisis  would 
have  been  quite  as  incapable  of  such  imagina- 
tive independence  as  Keats  and  Coleridge 
would  have  been  incapable  of  winning  the 
battle  of  Wattignies.  In  Paris  the  tree  of 
liberty  was  a  garden  tree,  clipped  very 
correctly;  and  Robespierre  used  the  razor 
more  regularly  than  the  guillotine.  Danton, 
who  knew  and  admired  English  literature, 
would  have  cursed  freely  over  Kubla  Khan; 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     21 

and  if  the  Committee  of  Public  Safety  had 
not  already  executed  Shelley  as  an  aristocrat, 
they  would  certainly  have  locked  him  up  for 
a  madman.  Even  Hebert  (the  one  really  vile 
Revolutionist),  had  he  been  reproached  by 
English  poets  with  worshipping  the  Goddess 
of  Reason,  might  legitimately  have  retorted 
that  it  was  rather  the  Goddess  of  Unreason 
that  they  set  up  to  be  worshipped.  Verbally 
considered,  Carlyle's  French  Revolution  was 
more  revolutionary  than  the  real  French 
Revolution:  and  if  Carrier,  in  an  exaggera- 
tive phrase,  empurpled  the  Loire  with  car- 
nage, Turner  almost  literally  set  the  Thames 
on  fire. 

This  trend  of  the  English  Romantics  to 
carry  out  the  revolutionary  idea  not  savagely 
in  works,  but  very  wildly  indeed  in  words,  had 
several  results;  the  most  important  of  which 
was  this.  It  started  English  literature  after 
the  Revolution  with  a  sort  of  bent  towards 
independence  and  eccentricity,  which  in  the 
brighter  wits  became  individuality,  and  in  the 


22    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

duller  ones,  Individualism.  English  Roman- 
tics, English  Liberals,  were  not  public  men 
making  a  republic,  but  poets,  each  seeing  a 
vision.  The  lonelier  version  of  liberty  was  a 
sort  of  aristocratic  anarchism  in  Byron  and 
Shelley;  but  though  in  Victorian  times  it 
faded  into  much  milder  prejudices  and  much 
more  Bourgeois  crotchets,  England  retained 
from  that  twist  a  certain  odd  separation 
and  privacy.  England  became  much  more 
of  an  island  than  she  had  ever  been  before. 
There  fell  from  her  about  this  time,  not  only 
the  understanding  of  France  or  Germany,  but 
to  her  own  long  and  yet  lingering  disaster,  the 
understanding  of  Ireland.  She  had  not  joined 
in  the  attempt  to  create  European  democ- 
racy; nor  did  she,  save  in  the  first  glow  of 
Waterloo,  join  in  the  counter-attempt  to 
destroy  it.  The  life  in  her  literature  was  still, 
to  a  large  extent,  the  romantic  liberalism  of 
Rousseau,  the  free  and  humane  truisms  that 
had  refreshed  the  other  nations,  the  return  to 
Nature  and  to  natural  rights.  But  that  which 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     23 

in  Rousseau  was  a  creed,  became  in  Hazlitt  a 
taste  and  in  Lamb  little  more  than  a  whim. 
These  latter  and  their  like  form  a  group  at  the 
beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century  of  those 
we  may  call  the  Eccentrics:  they  gather 
round  Coleridge  and  his  decaying  dreams  or 
linger  in  the  tracks  of  Keats  and  Shelley  and 
Godwin;  Lamb  with  his  bibliomania  and 
creed  of  pure  caprice,  the  most  unique  of  all 
geniuses;  Leigh  Hunt  with  his  Bohemian 
impecuniosity;  Landor  with  his  tempestuous 
temper,  throwing  plates  on  the  floor;  Hazlitt 
with  his  bitterness  and  his  low  love  affair; 
even  that  healthier  and  happier  Bohemian, 
Peacock.  With  these,  in  one  sense  at  least, 
goes  De  Quincey.  He  was,  unlike  most  of 
these  embers  of  the  revolutionary  age  in 
letters,  a  Tory;  and  was  attached  to  the 
political  army  which  is  best  represented  in 
letters  by  the  virile  laughter  and  leisure  of 
Wilson's  Noctes  Ambrosianae.  But  he  had 
nothing  in  common  with  that  environment. 
It  remained  for  some  time  as  a  Tory  tradition, 


24    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

which  balanced  the  cold  and  brilliant  aris- 
tocracy of  the  Whigs.  It  lived  on  the  legend 
of  Trafalgar;  the  sense  that  insularity  was 
independence;  the  sense  that  anomalies  are 
as  jolly  as  family  jokes;  the  general  sense  that 
old  salts  are  the  salt  of  the  earth.  It  still 
lives  in  some  old  songs  about  Nelson  or 
Waterloo,  which  are  vastly  more  pompous 
and  vastly  more  sincere  than  the  cockney 
cocksureness  of  later  Jingo  lyrics.  But  it  is 
hard  to  connect  De  Quincey  with  it;  or, 
indeed,  with  anything  else.  De  Quincey 
would  certainly  have  been  a  happier  man, 
and  almost  certainly  a  better  man,  if  he  had 
got  drunk  on  toddy  with  Wilson,  instead  of 
getting  calm  and  clear  (as  he  himself  de- 
scribes) on  opium,  and  with  no  company  but 
a  book  of  German  metaphysics.  But  he 
would  hardly  have  revealed  those  wonderful 
vistas  and  perspectives  of  prose,  which 
permit  one  to  call  him  the  first  and  most 
powerful  of  the  decadents:  those  sentences 
that  lengthen  out  like  nightmare  corridors,  or 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     25 

rise  higher  and  higher  like  impossible  eastern 
pagodas.  He  was  a  morbid  fellow,  and  far 
less  moral  than  Burns;  for  when  Burns  con- 
fessed excess  he  did  not  defend  it.  But  he 
has  cast  a  gigantic  shadow  on  our  literature, 
and  was  as  certainly  a  genius  as  Poe.  Also 
he  had  humour,  which  Poe  had  not.  And  if 
any  one  still  smarting  from  the  pinpricks  of 
Wilde  or  Whistler,  wants  to  convict  them  of 
plagiarism  in  their  "art  for  art"  epigrams 
— he  will  find  most  of  what  they  said  said 
better  in  Murder  as  One  of  the  Fine  Arts. 

One  great  man  remains  of  this  elder  group, 
who  did  their  last  work  only  under  Victoria; 
he  knew  most  of  the  members  of  it,  yet  he  did 
not  belong  to  it  in  any  corporate  sense.  He 
was  a  poor  man  and  an  invalid,  with  Scotch 
blood  and  a  strong,  though  perhaps  only 
inherited,  quarrel  with  the  old  Calvinism;  by 
name  Thomas  Hood.  Poverty  and  illness 
forced  him  to  the  toils  of  an  incessant  jester; 
and  the  revolt  against  gloomy  religion  made 
him  turn  his  wit,  whenever  he  could,  in  the 


26    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

direction  of  a  defence  of  happier  and  humaner 
views.  In  the  long  great  roll  that  includes 
Homer  and  Shakespeare,  he  was  the  last 
great  man  who  really  employed  the  pun. 
His  puns  were  not  all  good  (nor  were  Shake- 
speare's), but  the  best  of  them  were  a  strong 
and  fresh  form  of  art.  The  pun  is  said  to  be 
a  thing  of  two  meanings;  but  with  Hood  there 
were  three  meanings,  for  there  was  also  the 
abstract  truth  that  would  have  been  there 
with  no  pun  at  all.  The  pun  of  Hood  is 
underrated,  like  the  "wit"  of  Voltaire,  by 
those  who  forget  that  the  words  of  Voltaire 
were  not  pins,  but  swords.  In  Hood  at  his 
best  the  verbal  neatness  only  gives  to  the 
satire  or  the  scorn  a  ring  of  finality  such  as  is 
given  by  rhyme.  For  rhyme  does  go  with 
reason,  since  the  aim  of  both  is  to  bring  things 
to  an  end.  The  tragic  necessity  of  puns 
tautened  and  hardened  Hood's  genius;  so 
that  there  is  always  a  sort  of  shadow  of  that 
sharpness  across  all  his  serious  poems,  falling 
like  the  shadow  of  a  sword.  "Sewing  at  once 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     27 

with  a  double  thread  a  shroud  as  well  as  a 
shirt" — "We  thought  her  dying  when  she 
slept,  and  sleeping  when  she  died" — "Oh 
God,  that  bread  should  be  so  dear  and  flesh 
and  blood  so  cheap" — none  can  fail  to  note 
in  these  a  certain  fighting  discipline  of  phrase, 
a  compactness  and  point  which  was  well 
trained  in  lines  like  "A  cannon-ball  took  off 
his  legs,  so  he  laid  down  his  arms."  In 
France  he  would  have  been  a  great  epi- 
grammatist, like  Hugo.  In  England  he  is 
a  punster. 

There  was  nothing  at  least  in  this  group 
I  have  loosely  called  the  Eccentrics  that 
disturbs  the  general  sense  that  all  their 
generation  was  part  of  the  sunset  of  the  great 
revolutionary  poets.  This  fading  glamour 
affected  England  in  a  sentimental  and,  to 
some  extent,  a  snobbish  direction;  making 
men  feel  that  great  lords  with  long  curls 
and  whiskers  were  naturally  the  wits  that  led 
the  world.  But  it  affected  England  also 
negatively  and  by  reaction;  for  it  associated 


28    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

such  men  as  Byron  with  superiority,  but  not 
with  success.  The  English  middle  classes 
were  led  to  distrust  poetry  almost  as  much  as 
they  admired  it.  They  could  not  believe 
that  either  vision  at  the  one  end  or  violence  at 
the  other  could  ever  be  practical.  They  were 
deaf  to  that  great  warning  of  Hugo:  "You 
say  the  poet  is  in  the  clouds;  but  so  is  the 
thunderbolt."  Ideals  exhausted  themselves 
in  the  void;  Victorian  England,  very  unwisely, 
would  have  no  more  to  do  with  idealists  in 
politics.  And  this,  chiefly,  because  there  had 
been  about  these  great  poets  a  young  and 
splendid  sterility;  since  the  pantheist  Shelley 
was  in  fact  washed  under  by  the  wave  of  the 
world,  or  Byron  sank  in  death  as  he  drew  the 
sword  for  Hellas. 

The  chief  turn  of  nineteenth-century 
England  was  taken  about  the  time  when  a 
footman  at  Holland  House  opened  a  door 
and  announced  "Mr.  Macaulay."  Macau- 
lay's  literary  popularity  was  representative 
and  it  was  deserved;  but  his  presence  among 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     29 

the  great  Whig  families  marks  an  epoch.  He 
was  the  son  of  one  of  the  first  "friends  of  the 
negro,"  whose  honest  industry  and  philan- 
thropy were  darkened  by  a  religion  of  sombre 
smugness,  which  almost  makes  one  fancy 
they  loved  the  negro  for  his  colour,  and  would 
have  turned  away  from  red  or  yellow  men 
as  needlessly  gaudy.  But  his  wit  and  his 
politics  (combined  with  that  dropping  of  the 
Puritan  tenets  but  retention  of  the  Puritan 
tone  which  marked  his  class  and  generation), 
lifted  him  into  a  sphere  which  was  utterly 
opposite  to  that  from  which  he  came.  This 
Whig  world  was  exclusive;  but  it  was  not 
narrow.  It  was  very  difficult  for  an  outsider 
to  get  into  it;  but  if  he  did  get  into  it  he  was 
in  a  much  freer  atmosphere  than  any  other 
in  England.  Of  those  aristocrats,  the  Old 
Guard  of  the  eighteenth  century,  many  de- 
nied God,  many  defended  Bonaparte,  and 
nearly  all  sneered  at  the  Royal  Family.  Nor 
did  wealth  or  birth  make  any  barriers  for 
those  once  within  this  singular  Whig  world. 


30    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

The  platform  was  high,  but  it  was  level. 
Moreover  the  upstart  nowadays  pushes  him- 
self by  wealth:  but  the  Whigs  could  choose 
their  upstarts.  In  that  world  Macaulay 
found  Rogers,  with  his  phosphorescent  and 
corpse-like  brilliancy;  there  he  found  Sydney 
Smith,  bursting  with  crackers  of  common 
sense,  an  admirable  old  heathen;  there  he 
found  Tom  Moore,  the  romantic  of  the  Re- 
gency, a  shortened  shadow  of  Lord  Byron. 
That  he  reached  this  platform  and  remained 
on  it  is,  I  say,  typical  of  a  turning-point  in  the 
century.  For  the  fundamental  fact  of  early 
Victorian  history  was  this :  the  decision  of  the 
middle  classes  to  employ  their  new  wealth  in 
backing  up  a  sort  of  aristocratical  compromise, 
and  not  (like  the  middle  class  in  the  French 
Revolution)  insisting  on  a  clean  sweep  and 
a  clear  democratic  programme.  It  went 
along  with  the  decision  of  the  aristocracy  to 
recruit  itself  more  freely  from  the  middle 
class.  It  was  then  also  that  Victorian 
"prudery"  began:  the  great  lords  yielded  on 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     31 

this  as  on  Free  Trade.  These  two  decisions 
have  made  the  doubtful  England  of  to-day; 
and  Macaulay  is  typical  of  them;  he  is 
the  bourgeois  in  Belgravia.  The  alliance  is 
marked  by  his  great  speeches  for  Lord  Grey's 
Reform  Bill:  it  is  marked  even  more  signifi- 
cantly in  his  speech  against  the  Chartists. 
Cobbett  was  dead. 

Macaulay  makes  the  foundation  of  the 
Victorian  age  in  all  its  very  English  and 
unique  elements :  its  praise  of  Puritan  politics 
and  abandonment  of  Puritan  theology;  its 
belief  in  a  cautious  but  perpetual  patching  up 
of  the  Constitution;  its  admiration  for  in- 
dustrial wealth.  But  above  all  he  typifies  the 
two  things  that  really  make  the  Victorian 
Age  itself,  the  cheapness  and  narrowness  of 
its  conscious  formulae;  the  richness  and  hu- 
manity of  its  unconscious  tradition.  There 
were  two  Macaulays,  a  rational  Macaulay 
who  was  generally  wrong,  and  a  romantic 
Macaulay  who  was  almost  invariably  right. 
All  that  was  small  in  him  derives  from  the 


32    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

dull  parliamentarism  of  men  like  Sir  James 
Mackintosh;  but  all  that  was  great  in  him 
has  much  more  kinship  with  the  festive 
antiquarianism  of  Sir  Walter  Scott. 

As  a  philosopher  he  had  only  two  thoughts; 
and  neither  of  them  is  true.  The  first  was 
that  politics,  as  an  experimental  science,  must 
go  on  improving,  along  with  clocks,  pistols 
or  penknives,  by  the  mere  accumulation  of 
experiment  and  variety.  He  was,  indeed,  far 
too  strong-minded  a  man  to  accept  the  hazy 
modern  notion  that  the  soul  in  its  highest 
sense  can  change:  he  seems  to  have  held 
that  religion  can  never  get  any  better  and 
that  poetry  rather  tends  to  get  worse.  But 
he  did  not  see  the  flaw  in  his  political  theory; 
which  is  that  unless  the  soul  improves  with 
tune  there  is  no  guarantee  that  the  accumula- 
tions of  experience  will  be  adequately  used. 
Figures  do  not  add  themselves  up;  birds  do 
not  label  or  stuff  themselves;  comets  do  not 
calculate  their  own  courses;  these  things  are 
done  by  the  soul  of  man.  And  if  the  soul  of 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     33 

man  is  subject  to  other  laws,  is  liable  to  sin, 
to  sleep,  to  anarchism  or  to  suicide,  then  all 
sciences  including  politics  may  fall  as  sterile 
and  lie  as  fallow  as  before  man's  reason  was 
made.  Macaulay  seemed  sometimes  to  talk 
as  if  clocks  produced  clocks,  or  guns  had 
families  of  little  pistols,  or  a  penknife  littered 
like  a  pig.  The  other  view  he  held  was  the 
more  or  less  utilitarian  theory  of  toleration; 
that  we  should  get  the  best  butcher  whether 
he  was  a  Baptist  or  a  Muggletonian,  and  the 
best  soldier  whether  he  was  a  Wesleyan  or 
an  Irvingite.  The  compromise  worked  well 
enough  in  an  England  Protestant  in  bulk; 
but  Macaulay  ought  to  have  seen  that  it  has 
its  limitations.  A  good  butcher  might  be  a 
Baptist;  he  is  not  very  likely  to  be  a  Bud- 
dhist. A  good  soldier  might  be  a  Wesleyan; 
he  would  hardly  be  a  Quaker.  For  the  rest, 
Macaulay  was  concerned  to  interpret  the 
seventeenth  century  in  terms  of  the  triumph 
of  the  Whigs  as  champions  of  public  rights; 
and  he  upheld  this  one-sidedly  but  not  malig- 


34    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

nantly  in  a  style  of  rounded  and  ringing 
sentences,  which  at  its  best  is  like  steel  and 
at  its  worst  like  tin. 

This  was  the  small  conscious  Macaulay; 
the  great  unconscious  Macaulay  was  very 
different.  His  noble  enduring  quality  in  our 
literature  is  this:  that  he  truly  had  an  ab- 
stract passion  for  history;  a  warm,  poetic  and 
sincere  enthusiasm  for  great  things  as  such; 
an  ardour  and  appetite  for  great  books,  great 
battles,  great  cities,  great  men.  He  felt  and 
used  names  like  trumpets.  The  reader's 
greatest  joy  is  in  the  writer's  own  joy,  when 
he  can  let  his  last  phrase  fall  like  a  hammer 
on  some  resounding  name  like  Hildebrand  or 
Charlemagne,  on  the  eagles  of  Rome  or  the 
pillars  of  Hercules.  As  with  Walter  Scott, 
some  of  the  best  things  in  his  prose  and  poetry 
are  the  surnames  that  he  did  not  make.  And 
it  is  remarkable  to  notice  that  this  romance  of 
history,  so  far  from  making  him  more  partial 
or  untrustworthy,  was  the  only  thing  that 
made  him  moderately  just.  His  reason  was 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     35 

entirely  one-sided  and  fanatical.  It  was  his 
imagination  that  was  well-balanced  and 
broad.  He  was  monotonously  certain  that 
only  Whigs  were  right;  but  it  was  necessary 
that  Tories  should  at  least  be  great,  that  his 
heroes  might  have  foemen  worthy  of  their 
steel.  If  there  was  one  thing  in  the  world 
he  hated  it  was  a  High  Church  Royalist 
parson;  yet  when  Jeremy  Collier  the  Jaco- 
bite priest  raises  a  real  banner,  all  Macaulay's 
blood  warms  with  the  mere  prospect  of  a 
fight.  "It  is  inspiriting  to  see  how  gallantly 
the  solitary  outlaw  advances  to  attack  ene- 
mies formidable  separately,  and,  it  might  have 
been  thought,  irresistible  when  combined; 
distributes  his  swashing  blows  right  and  left 
among  Wycherley,  Congreve  and  Vanbrugh, 
treads  the  wretched  D'Urfey  down  in  the 
dirt  beneath  his  feet;  and  strikes  with  all  his 
strength  full  at  the  towering  crest  of  Dryden." 
That  is  exactly  where  Macaulay  is  great; 
because  he  is  almost  Homeric.  The  whole 
triumph  turns  upon  mere  names;  but  men  are 


36    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

commanded  by  names.  So  his  poem  on  the 
Armada  is  really  a  good  geography  book 
gone  mad;  one  sees  the  map  of  England  come 
alive  and  march  and  mix  under  the  eye. 

The  chief  tragedy  in  the  trend  of  later 
literature  may  be  expressed  by  saying  that 
the  smaller  Macaulay  conquered  the  larger. 
Later  men  had  less  and  less  of  that  hot  love  of 
history  he  had  inherited  from  Scott.  They 
had  more  and  more  of  that  cold  science 
of  self-interests  which  he  had  learnt  from 
Bentham. 

The  name  of  this  great  man,  though  it 
belongs  to  a  period  before  the  Victorian,  is, 
like  the  name  of  Cobbett,  very  important  to 
it.  In  substance  Macaulay  accepted  the  con- 
clusions of  Bentham;  though  he  offered 
brilliant  objections  to  all  his  arguments.  In 
any  case  the  soul  of  Bentham  (if  he  had  one) 
went  marching  on,  like  John  Brown;  and 
in  the  central  Victorian  movement  it  was 
certainly  he  who  won.  John  Stuart  Mill  was 
the  final  flower  of  that  growth.  He  was 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     37 

himself  fresh  and  delicate  and  pure;  but  that 
is  the  business  of  a  flower.  Though  he  had 
to  preach  a  hard  rationalism  in  religion,  a 
hard  competition  in  economics,  a  hard  egoism 
in  ethics,  his  own  soul  had  all  that  silvery 
sensitiveness  that  can  be  seen  in  his  fine 
portrait  by  Watts.  He  boasted  none  of  that 
brutal  optimism  with  which  his  friends  and 
followers  of  the  Manchester  School  expounded 
their  cheery  negations.  There  was  about 
Mill  even  a  sort  of  embarrassment;  he  exhib- 
ited all  the  wheels  of  his  iron  universe  rather 
reluctantly,  like  a  gentleman  in  trade  showing 
ladies  over  his  factory.  There  shone  in  him 
a  beautiful  reverence  for  women,  which  is  all 
the  more  touching  because,  in  his  department, 
as  it  were,  he  could  only  offer  them  so  dry  a 
gift  as  the  Victorian  Parliamentary  Franchise. 
Now  in  trying  to  describe  how  the  Victorian 
writers  stood  to  each  other,  we  must  recur 
to  the  very  real  difficulty  noted  at  the  begin- 
ning: the  difficulty  of  keeping  the  moral 
order  parallel  with  the  chronological  order. 


38    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

For  the  mind  moves  by  instincts,  associations, 
premonitions  and  not  by  fixed  dates  or  com- 
pleted processes.  Action  and  reaction  will 
occur  simultaneously:  or  the  cause  actually 
be  found  after  the  effect.  Errors  will  be  re- 
sisted before  they  have  been  properly  pro- 
mulgated: notions  will  be  first  defined  long 
after  they  are  dead.  It  is  no  good  getting  the 
almanac  to  look  up  moonshine;  and  most 
literature  in  this  sense  is  moonshine.  Thus 
Wordsworth  shrank  back  into  Toryism,  as 
it  were,  from  a  Shelleyan  extreme  of  panthe- 
ism as  yet  disembodied.  Thus  Newman  took 
down  the  iron  sword  of  dogma  to  parry  a 
blow  not  yet  delivered,  that  was  coming  from 
the  club  of  Darwin.  For  this  reason  no  one 
can  understand  tradition,  or  even  history, 
who  has  not  some  tenderness  for  anachronism. 
Now  for  the  great  part  of  the  Victorian 
era  the  utilitarian  tradition  which  reached  its 
highest  in  Mill  held  the  centre  of  the  field;  it 
was  the  philosophy  in  office,  so  to  speak.  It 
sustained  its  march  of  codification  and  inquiry 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     39 

until  it  had  made  possible  the  great  victories 
of  Darwin  and  Huxley  and  Wallace.  If  we 
take  Macaulay  at  the  beginning  of  the  epoch 
and  Huxley  at  the  end  of  it,  we  shall  find  that 
they  had  much  in  common.  They  were  both 
square-jawed,  simple  men,  greedy  of  contro- 
versy but  scornful  of  sophistry,  dead  to  mysti- 
cism but  very  much  alive  to  morality;  and 
they  were  both  very  much  more  under  the 
influence  of  their  own  admirable  rhetoric 
than  they  knew.  Huxley,  especially,  was 
much  more  a  literary  than  a  scientific  man. 
It  is  amusing  to  note  that  when  Huxley  was 
charged  with  being  rhetorical,  he  expressed 
his  horror  of  "plastering  the  fair  face  of  truth 
with  that  pestilent  cosmetic,  rhetoric,"  which 
is  itself  about  as  well-plastered  a  piece  of 
rhetoric  as  Ruskin  himself  could  have  man- 
aged. The  difference  that  the  period  had 
developed  can  best  be  seen  if  we  consider 
this :  that  while  neither  was  of  a  spiritual  sort, 
Macaulay  took  it  for  granted  that  common 
sense  required  some  kind  of  theology,  while 


40    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

Huxley  took  it  for  granted  that  common  sense 
meant  having  none.  Macaulay,  it  is  said, 
never  talked  about  his  religion:  but  Huxley 
was  always  talking  about  the  religion  he 
hadn't  got. 

But  though  this  simple  Victorian  rational- 
ism held  the  centre,  and  in  a  certain  sense  was 
the  Victorian  era,  it  was  assailed  on  many 
sides,  and  had  been  assailed  even  before  the 
beginning  of  that  era.  The  rest  of  the 
intellectual  history  of  the  time  is  a  series  of 
reactions  against  it,  which  come  wave  after 
wave.  They  have  succeeded  in  shaking  it, 
but  not  in  dislodging  it  from  the  modern 
mind.  The  first  of  these  was  the  Oxford 
Movement;  a  bow  that  broke  when  it  had 
let  loose  the  flashing  arrow  that  was  Newman. 
The  second  reaction  was  one  man;  without 
teachers  or  pupils — Dickens.  The  third  re- 
action was  a  group  that  tried  to  create  a  sort 
of  new  romantic  Protestantism,  to  pit  against 
both  Reason  and  Rome — Carlyle,  Rus- 
kin,  Kingsley,  Maurice — perhaps  Tennyson. 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     41 

Browning  also  was  at  once  romantic  and 
Puritan;  but  he  belonged  to  no  group,  and 
worked  against  materialism  in  a  manner 
entirely  his  own.  Though  as  a  boy  he  bought 
eagerly  Shelley's  revolutionary  poems,  he  did 
not  think  of  becoming  a  revolutionary  poet. 
He  concentrated  on  the  special  souls  of  men; 
seeking  God  in  a  series  of  private  interviews. 
Hence  Browning,  great  as  he  is,  is  rather  one 
of  the  Victorian  novelists  than  wholly  of  the 
Victorian  poets.  From  Ruskin,  again,  de- 
scend those  who  may  be  called  the  Pre- 
Raphaelites  of  prose  and  poetry. 

It  is  really  with  this  rationalism  trium- 
phant, and  with  the  romance  of  these  various 
attacks  on  it,  that  the  study  of  Victorian 
literature  begins  and  proceeds.  Bentham  was 
already  the  prophet  of  a  powerful  sect; 
Macaulay  was  already  the  historian  of  an 
historic  party,  before  the  true  Victorian 
epoch  began.  The  middle  classes  were 
emerging  in  a  state  of  damaged  Puritanism. 
The  upper  classes  were  utterly  pagan.  Their 


42    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

clear  and  courageous  testimony  remains  in 
those  immortal  words  of  Lord  Melbourne, 
who  had  led  the  young  queen  to  the  throne 
and  long  stood  there  as  her  protector.  "No 
one  has  more  respect  for  the  Christian  relig- 
ion than  I  have;  but  really,  when  it  comes  to 

intruding  it  into  private  life "  What  was 

pure  paganism  in  the  politics  of  Melbourne 
became  a  sort  of  mystical  cynicism  in  the 
politics  of  Disraeli;  and  is  well  mirrored  in 
his  novels — for  he  was  a  man  who  felt  at  home 
in  mirrors.  With  every  allowance  for  aliens 
and  eccentrics  and  all  the  accidents  that  must 
always  eat  the  edges  of  any  systematic  cir- 
cumference, it  may  still  be  said  that  the  Util- 
itarians held  the  fort. 

Of  the  Oxford  Movement  what  remains 
most  strongly  in  the  Victorian  Epoch  centres 
round  the  challenge  of  Newman,  its  one  great 
literary  man.  But  the  movement  as  a  whole 
had  been  of  great  significance  in  the  very 
genesis  and  make  up  of  the  society :  yet  that 
significance  is  not  quite  easy  immediately  to 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     43 

define.  It  was  certainly  not  aesthetic  ritual- 
ism; scarcely  one  of  the  Oxford  High  Church- 
men was  what  we  should  call  a  Ritualist.  It 
was  certainly  not  a  conscious  reaching  out 
towards  Rome:  except  on  a  Roman  Catholic 
theory  which  might  explain  all  our  unrests 
by  that  dim  desire.  It  knew  little  of  Europe, 
it  knew  nothing  of  Ireland,  to  which  any 
merely  Roman  Catholic  revulsion  would  ob- 
viously have  turned.  In  the  first  instance, 
I  think,  the  more  it  is  studied,  the  more  it 
would  appear  that  it  was  a  movement  of  mere 
religion  as  such.  It  was  not  so  much  a  taste 
for  Catholic  dogma,  but  simply  a  hunger  for 
dogma.  For  dogma  means  the  serious  satis- 
faction of  the  mind.  Dogma  does  not  mean 
the  absence  of  thought,  but  the  end  of  thought. 
It  was  a  revolt  against  the  Victorian  spirit 
in  one  particular  aspect  of  it;  which  may 
roughly  be  called  (in  a  cosy  and  domestic 
Victorian  metaphor)  having  your  cake  and 
eating  it  too.  It  saw  that  the  solid  and 
serious  Victorians  were  fundamentally  frivo- 


44    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

lous — because  they  were  fundamentally  in- 
consistent. 

A  man  making  the  confession  of  any  creed 
worth  ten  minutes'  intelligent  talk,  is  always 
a  man  who  gains  something  and  gives  up 
something.  So  long  as  he  does  both  he  can 
create:  for  he  is  making  an  outline  and  a 
shape.  Mahomet  created,  when  he  forbade 
wine  but  allowed  five  wives:  he  created  a 
very  big  thing,  which  we  have  still  to  deal 
with.  The  first  French  Republic  created, 
when  it  affirmed  property  and  abolished 
peerages;  France  still  stands  like  a  square, 
four-sided  building  which  Europe  has  be- 
sieged in  vain.  The  men  of  the  Oxford 
Movement  would  have  been  horrified  at  being 
compared  either  with  Moslems  or  Jacobins. 
But  their  sub-conscious  thirst  was  for  some- 
thing that  Moslems  and  Jacobins  had  and 
ordinary  Anglicans  had  not:  the  exalted 
excitement  of  consistency.  If  you  were  a 
Moslem  you  were  not  a  Bacchanal.  If  you 
were  a  Republican  you  were  not  a  peer.  And 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     45 

so  the  Oxford  men,  even  in  their  first  and 
dimmest  stages,  felt  that  if  you  were  a  Church- 
man you  were  not  a  Dissenter.  The  Oxford 
Movement  was,  out  of  the  very  roots  of  its 
being,  a  rational  movement;  almost  a  ration- 
alist movement.  In  that  it  differed  sharply 
from  the  other  reactions  that  shook  the  Utili- 
tarian compromise;  the  blinding  mysticism 
of  Carlyle,  the  mere  manly  emotionalism  of 
Dickens.  It  was  an  appeal  to  reason:  reason 
said  that  if  a  Christian  had  a  feast  day  he 
must  have  a  fast  day  too.  Otherwise,  all 
days  ought  to  be  alike;  and  this  was  that 
very  Utilitarianism  against  which  their  Ox- 
ford Movement  was  the  first  and  most 
rational  assault. 

This  idea,  even  by  reason  of  its  reason, 
narrowed  into  a  sort  of  sharp  spear,  of  which 
the  spear  blade  was  Newman.  It  did  forget 
many  of  the  other  forces  that  were  fighting 
on  its  side.  But  the  movement  could  boast, 
first  and  last,  many  men  who  had  this  eager 
dogmatic  quality:  Keble,  who  spoilt  a  poem 


46    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

in  order  to  recognise  a  doctrine;  Faber,  who 
told  the  rich,  almost  with  taunts,  that  God 
sent  the  poor  as  eagles  to  strip  them;  Froude, 
who  with  Newman  announced  his  return  in 
the  arrogant  motto  of  Achilles.  But  the 
greater  part  of  all  this  happened  before  what 
is  properly  our  period;  and  in  that  period 
Newman,  and  perhaps  Newman  alone,  is  the 
expression  and  summary  of  the  whole  school. 
It  was  certainly  in  the  Victorian  Age,  and 
after  his  passage  to  Rome,  that  Newman 
claimed  his  complete  right  to  be  in  any  book 
on  modern  English  literature.  This  is  no 
place  for  estimating  his  theology:  but  one 
point  about  it  does  clearly  emerge.  Whatever 
else  is  right,  the  theory  that  Newman  went 
over  to  Rome  to  find  peace  and  an  end  of 
argument,  is  quite  unquestionably  wrong. 
He  had  far  more  quarrels  after  he  had  gone 
over  to  Rome.  But,  though  he  had  far  more 
quarrels,  he  had  far  fewer  compromises:  and 
he  was  of  that  temper  which  is  tortured  more 
by  compromise  than  by  quarrel.  He  was  a 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     47 

man  at  once  of  abnormal  energy  and  abnor- 
mal sensibility:  nobody  without  that  com- 
bination could  have  written  the  Apologia.  If 
he  sometimes  seemed  to  skin  his  enemies 
alive,  it  was  because  he  himself  lacked  a  skin. 
In  this  sense  his  Apologia  is  a  triumph  far 
beyond  the  ephemeral  charge  on  which  it  was 
founded;  in  this  sense  he  does  indeed  (to  use 
his  own  expression)  vanquish  not  his  accuser 
but  his  judges.  Many  men  would  shrink  from 
recording  all  their  cold  fits  and  hesitations 
and  prolonged  inconsistencies:  I  am  sure  it 
was  the  breath  of  life  to  Newman  to  confess 
them,  now  that  he  had  done  with  them  for 
ever.  His  Lectures  on  the  Present  Position  of 
English  Catholics,  practically  preached  against 
a  raging  mob,  rise  not  only  higher  but  happier, 
as  his  instant  unpopularity  increases.  There 
is  something  grander  than  humour,  there  is 
fun,  hi  the  very  first  lecture  about  the  British 
Constitution  as  explained  to  a  meeting  of 
Russians.  But  always  his  triumphs  are  the 
triumphs  of  a  highly  sensitive  man:  a  man 


48    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

must  feel  insults  before  he  can  so  insultingly 
and  splendidly  avenge  them.  He  is  a  naked 
man,  who  carries  a  naked  sword.  The 
quality  of  his  literary  style  is  so  successful 
that  it  succeeds  in  escaping  definition.  The 
quality  of  his  logic  is  that  of  a  long  but  pas- 
sionate patience,  which  waits  until  he  has 
fixed  all  corners  of  an  iron  trap.  But  the 
quality  of  his  moral  comment  on  the  age 
remains  what  I  have  said:  a  protest  of  the 
rationality  of  religion  as  against  the  increasing 
irrationality  of  mere  Victorian  comfort  and 
compromise.  So  far  as  the  present  purpose 
is  concerned,  his  protest  died  with  him:  he 
left  few  imitators  and  (it  may  easily  be 
conceived)  no  successful  imitators.  The  sug- 
gestion of  him  lingers  on  in  the  exquisite 
Elizabethan  perversity  of  Coventry  Patmore; 
and  has  later  flamed  out  from  the  shy  volcano 
of  Francis  Thompson.  Otherwise  (as  we 
shall  see  in  the  parallel  case  of  Ruskin's 
Socialism)  he  has  no  followers  in  his  own  age: 
but  very  many  in  ours. 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     49 

The  next  group  of  reactionaries  or  roman- 
tics or  whatever  we  elect  to  call  them,  gathers 
roughly  around  one  great  name.  Scotland, 
from  which  had  come  so  many  of  those  harsh 
economists  who  made  the  first  Radical  phi- 
losophies of  the  Victorian  Age,  was  destined 
also  to  fling  forth  (I  had  almost  said  to  spit 
forth)  their  fiercest  and  most  extraordinary 
enemy.  The  two  primary  things  in  Thomas 
Carlyle  were  his  early  Scotch  education  and 
his  later  German  culture.  The  first  was  in 
almost  all  respects  his  strength;  the  latter  in 
some  respects  his  weakness.  As  an  ordinary 
lowland  peasant,  he  inherited  the  really  valu- 
able historic  property  of  the  Scots,  their  in- 
dependence, their  fighting  spirit,  and  their 
instinctive  philosophic  consideration  of  men 
merely  as  men.  But  he  was  not  an  ordinary 
peasant.  If  he  had  laboured  obscurely  in 
his  village  till  death,  he  would  have  been  yet 
locally  a  marked  man;  a  man  with  a  wild 
eye,  a  man  with  an  air  of  silent  anger;  per- 
haps a  man  at  whom  stones  were  sometimes 


50    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

thrown.  A  strain  of  disease  and  suffering  ran 
athwart  both  his  body  and  his  soul.  In  spite 
of  his  praise  of  silence,  it  was  only  through  his 
gift  of  utterance  that  he  escaped  madness. 
But  while  his  fellow-peasants  would  have 
seen  this  in  him  and  perhaps  mocked  it,  they 
would  also  have  seen  something  which  they 
always  expect  in  such  men,  and  they  would 
have  got  it:  vision,  a  power  in  the  mind  akin 
to  second  sight.  Like  many  ungainly  or 
otherwise  unattractive  Scotchmen,  he  was  a 
seer.  By  which  I  do  not  mean  to  refer  so 
much  to  his  transcendental  rhapsodies  about 
the  World-soul  or  the  Nature-garment  or  the 
Mysteries  and  Eternities  generally ,these  seem 
to  me  to  belong  more  to  his  German  side  and 
to  be  less  sincere  and  vital.  I  mean  a  real 
power  of  seeing  things  suddenly,  not  appar- 
ently reached  by  any  process;  a  grand  power 
of  guessing.  He  saw  the  crowd  of  the  new 
States  General,  Danton  with  his  "rude 
flattened  face,"  Robespierre  peering  mistily 
through  his  spectacles.  He  saw  the  English 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     51 

charge  at  Dunbar.  He  guessed  that  Mirabeau, 
however  dissipated  and  diseased,  had  some- 
thing sturdy  inside  him.  He  guessed  that 
Lafayette,  however  brave  and  victorious,  had 
nothing  inside  him.  He  supported  the  law- 
lessness of  Cromwell,  because  across  two  cen- 
turies he  almost  physically  felt  the  feebleness 
and  hopelessness  of  the  moderate  Parliamen- 
tarians. He  said  a  word  of  sympathy  for  the 
universally  vituperated  Jacobins  of  the  Moun- 
tain, because  through  thick  veils  of  national 
prejudice  and  misrepresentation,  he  felt  the 
impossibility  of  the  Gironde.  He  was  wrong 
in  denying  to  Scott  the  power  of  being  inside 
his  characters:  but  he  really  had  a  good  deal 
of  that  power  himself.  It  was  one  of  his  in- 
numerable and  rather  provincial  crotchets  to 
encourage  prose  as  against  poetry.  But,  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  he  himself  was  much  greater 
considered  as  a  kind  of  poet  than  considered 
as  anything  else;  and  the  central  idea  of  poe- 
try is  the  idea  of  guessing  right,  like  a  child. 
He  first  emerged,  as  it  were,  as  a  student 


52    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

and  disciple  of  Goethe.  The  connection  was 
not  wholly  fortunate.  With  much  of  what 
Goethe  really  stood  for  he  was  not  really  in 
sympathy;  but  in  his  own  obstinate  way,  he 
tried  to  knock  his  idol  into  shape  instead  of 
choosing  another.  He  pushed  further  and 
further  the  extravagances  of  a  vivid  but  very 
unbalanced  and  barbaric  style,  in  the  praise 
of  a  poet  who  really  represented  the  calmest 
classicism  and  the  attempt  to  restore  a  Hel- 
lenic equilibrium  in  the  mind.  It  is  like  watch- 
ing a  shaggy  Scandinavian  decorating  a  Greek 
statue  washed  up  by  chance  on  his  shores. 
And  while  the  strength  of  Goethe  was  a 
strength  of  completion  and  serenity,  which 
Carlyle  not  only  never  found  but  never  even 
sought,  the  weaknesses  of  Goethe  were  of  a 
sort  that  did  not  draw  the  best  out  of  Carlyle. 
The  one  civilised  element  that  the  German 
classicists  forgot  to  put  into  their  beautiful 
balance  was  a  sense  of  humour.  And  great 
poet  as  Goethe  was,  there  is  to  the  last  some- 
thing faintly  fatuous  about  his  half  sceptical, 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     53 

half  sentimental  self-importance;  a  Lord 
Chamberlain  of  teacup  politics;  an  earnest 
and  elderly  flirt;  a  German  of  the  Germans. 
Now  Carlyle  had  humour;  he  had  it  in  his 
very  style,  but  it  never  got  into  his  philosophy. 
His  philosophy  largely  remained  a  heavy 
Teutonic  idealism,  absurdly  unaware  of  the 
complexity  of  things;  as  when  he  perpetually 
repeated  (as  with  a  kind  of  flat-footed 
stamping)  that  people  ought  to  tell  the 
truth;  apparently  supposing,  to  quote 
Stevenson's  phrase,  that  telling  the  truth 
is  as  easy  as  blind  hookey.  Yet,  though  his 
general  honesty  is  unquestionable,  he  was  by 
no  means  one  of  those  who  will  give  up  a 
fancy  under  the  shock  of  a  fact.  If  by  sheer 
genius  he  frequently  guessed  right,  he  was  not 
the  kind  of  man  to  admit  easily  that  he  had 
guessed  wrong.  His  version  of  Cromwell's 
filthy  cruelties  hi  Ireland,  or  his  impatient 
slurring  over  of  the  most  sinister  riddle  in 
the  morality  of  Frederick  the  Great — these 
passages  are,  one  must  frankly  say,  dis- 


54    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

ingenuous.  But  it  is,  so  to  speak,  a  generous 
disingenuousness;  the  heat  and  momentum 
of  sincere  admirations,  not  the  shuffling  fear 
and  flattery  of  the  constitutional  or  patriotic 
historian.  It  bears  most  resemblance  to  the 
incurable  prejudices  of  a  woman. 

For  the  rest  there  hovered  behind  all  this 
transcendental  haze  a  certain  presence  of 
old  northern  paganism;  he  really  had  some 
sympathy  with  the  vast  vague  gods  of  that 
moody  but  not  unmanly  Nature-worship 
which  seems  to  have  filled  the  darkness  of  the 
North  before  the  coming  of  the  Roman  Eagle 
or  the  Christian  Cross.  This  he  combined, 
allowing  for  certain  sceptical  omissions,  with 
the  grisly  Old  Testament  God  he  had  heard 
about  in  the  black  Sabbaths  of  his  childhood; 
and  so  promulgated  (against  both  Rational- 
ists and  Catholics)  a  sort  of  heathen  Puri- 
tanism :  Protestantism  purged  of  its  evidences 
of  Christianity. 

His  great  and  real  work  was  the  attack  on 
Utilitarianism:  which  did  real  good,  though 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     55 

there  was  much  that  was  muddled  and  dan- 
gerous in  the  historical  philosophy  which  he 
preached  as  an  alternative.  It  is  his  real 
glory  that  he  was  the  first  to  see  clearly  and 
say  plainly  the  great  truth  of  our  time;  that 
the  wealth  of  the  state  is  not  the  prosperity 
of  the  people.  Macaulay  and  the  Mills  and 
all  the  regular  run  of  the  Early  Victorians, 
took  it  for  granted  that  if  Manchester  was 
getting  richer,  we  had  got  hold  of  the  key  to 
comfort  and  progress.  Carlyle  pointed  out 
(with  stronger  sagacity  and  humour  than  he 
showed  on  any  other  question)  that  it  was 
just  as  true  to  say  that  Manchester  was  get- 
ting poorer  as  that  it  was  getting  richer:  or,  in 
other  words,  that  Manchester  was  not  getting 
richer  at  all,  but  only  some  of  the  less  pleasing 
people  in  Manchester.  In  this  matter  he  is 
to  be  noted  in  connection  with  national  de- 
velopments much  later;  for  he  thus  became 
the  first  prophet  of  the  Socialists.  Sartor 
Resartus  is  an  admirable  fantasia;  The  French 
Revolution  is,  with  all  its  faults,  a  really  fine 


56    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

piece  of  history;  the  lectures  on  Heroes 
contain  some  masterly  sketches  of  person- 
alities. But  I  think  it  is  in  Past  and  Present, 
and  the  essay  on  Chartism,  that  Carlyle 
achieves  the  work  he  was  chosen  by  gods  and 
men  to  achieve;  whic^t, possibly  might  not 

•*•  '?'?••*. 

have  been  achieved  By  a  happier  or  more 
healthy-minded  man.  He  never  rose  to  more 
deadly  irony  than  in  such  macabre  descriptions 
as  that  of  the  poor  woman  proving  her  sister- 
hood with  the  rich  by  giving  them  all  typhoid 
fever;  or  that  perfect  piece  of  badinage 
about  "Overproduction  of  Shirts";  in  which 
he  imagines  the  aristocrats  claiming  to  be 
quite  clear  of  this  offence.  "Will  you  bandy 
accusations,  will  you  accuse  us  of  over- 
production? We  take  the  Heavens  and  the 
Earth  to  witness  that  we  have  produced 
nothing  at  all  .  .  .  He  that  accuses  us  of  pro- 
ducing, let  him  show  himself.  Let  him  say 
what  and  when."  And  he  never  wrote  so 
sternly  and  justly  as  when  he  compared  the 
"divine  sorrow"  of  Dante  with  the  "undivine 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     57 

sorrow"  of  Utilitarianism,  which  had  already 
come  down  to  talking  about  the  breeding  of 
the  poor  and  to  hinting  at  infanticide.  This 
is  a  representative  quarrel;  for  if  the  Utilita- 
rian spirit  reached  its  highest  point  in  Mill,  it 
certainly  reached  its  lowest  point  in  Malthus. 
One  last  element  in  the  influence  of  Carlyle 
ought  to  be  mentioned;  because  it  very 
strongly  dominated  his  disciples — especially 
Kingsley,  and  to  some  extent  Tennyson  and 
Ruskin.  Because  he  frowned  at  the  cockney 
cheerfulness  of  the  cheaper  economists,  they 
and  others  represented  him  as  a  pessimist, 
and  reduced  all  his  azure  infinities  to  a  fit 
of  the  blues.  But  Carlyle's  philosophy,  more 
carefully  considered,  will  be  found  to  be 
dangerously  optimist  rather  than  pessimist. 
As  a  thinker  Carlyle  is  not  sad,  but  recklessly 
and  rather  unscrupulously  satisfied.  For  he 
seems  to  have  held  the  theory  that  good  could 
not  be  definitely  defeated  hi  this  world;  and 
that  everything  in  the  long  run  finds  its  right 
level.  It  began  with  what  we  may  call  the 


58     VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

"Bible  of  History"  idea:  that  all  human 
affairs  and  politics  were  a  clouded  but  un- 
broken revelation  of  the  divine.  Thus  any 
enormous  and  unaltered  human  settlement — 
as  the  Norman  Conquest  or  the  secession  of 
America — we  must  suppose  to  be  the  will  of 
God.  It  lent  itself  to  picturesque  treatment; 
and  Carlyle  and  the  Carlyleans  were  above 
all  things  picturesque.  It  gave  them  at  first 
a  rhetorical  advantage  over  the  Catholic  and 
other  older  schools.  They  could  boast  that 
their  Creator  was  still  creating;  that  he  was 
in  Man  and  Nature,  and  was  not  hedged 
round  in  a  Paradise  or  imprisoned  in  a  pyx. 
They  could  say  their  God  had  not  grown  too 
old  for  war:  that  He  was  present  at  Gettys- 
burg and  Gravelotte  as  much  as  at  Gibeon 
and  Gilboa.  I  do  not  mean  that  they  literally 
said  these  particular  things:  they  are  what  I 
should  have  said  had  I  been  bribed  to  defend 
their  position.  But  they  said  things  to  the 
same  effect:  that  what  manages  finally  to 
happen,  happens  for  a  higher  purpose.  Car- 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     59 

lyle  said  the  French  Revolution  was  a  thing 
settled  in  the  eternal  councils  to  be;  and  there- 
fore (and  not  because  it  was  right)  attacking 
it  was ' '  fighting  against  God . "  And  Kingsley 
even  carried  the  principle  so  far  as  to  tell  a 
lady  she  should  remain  in  the  Church  of 
England  mainly  because  God  had  put  her 
there.  But  in  spite  of  its  superficial  spiritu- 
ality and  encouragement,  it  is  not  hard  to  see 
how  such  a  doctrine  could  be  abused.  It  prac- 
tically comes  to  saying  that  God  is  on  the  side 
of  the  big  battalions — or  at  least,  of  the  vic- 
torious ones.  Thus  a  creed  which  set  out  to 
create  conquerors  would  only  corrupt  soldiers; 
corrupt  them  with  a  craven  and  unsoldierly 
worship  of  success:  and  that  which  began  as 
the  philosophy  of  courage  ends  as  the  phi- 
losophy of  cowardice.  If,  indeed,  Carlyle 
were  right  in  saying  that  right  is  only  "rightly 
articulated"  might,  men  would  never  articu- 
late or  move  in  any  way.  For  no  act  can  have 
might  before  it  is  done:  if  there  is  no  right, 
it  cannot  rationally  be  done  at  all.  This 


60    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

element,  like  the  Anti-Utilitarian  element,  is 
to  be  kept  in  mind  in  connection  with  after 
developments:  for  in  this  Carlyle  is  the  first 
cry  of  Imperialism,  as  (in  the  other  case)  of 
Socialism:  and  the  two  babes  unborn  who 
stir  at  the  trumpet  are  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  and 
Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling.  Kipling  also  carries 
on  from  Carlyle  the  concentration  on  the 
purely  Hebraic  parts  of  the  Bible.  The  fal- 
lacy of  this  whole  philosophy  is  that  if  God 
is  indeed  present  at  a  modern  battle,  He  may 
be  present  not  as  on  Gilboa  but  Golgotha. 

Carlyle's  direct  historical  worship  of 
strength  and  the  rest  of  it  was  fortunately  not 
very  fruitful;  and  perhaps  lingered  only  in 
Froude  the  historian.  Even  he  is  more  an  in- 
terruption than  a  continuity.  Froude  devel- 
ops rather  the  harsher  and  more  impatient 
moral  counsels  of  his  master  than  like  Ruskin 
the  more  romantic  and  sympathetic.  He 
carries  on  the  tradition  of  Hero  Worship:  but 
carries  far  beyond  Carlyle  the  practice  of  wor- 
shipping people  who  cannot  rationally  be 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     61 

called  heroes.  In  this  matter  that  eccentric 
eye  of  the  seer  certainly  helped  Carlyle:  in 
Cromwell  and  Frederick  the  Great  there  was 
at  least  something  self-begotten,  original  or 
mystical;  if  they  were  not  heroes  they  were 
at  least  demigods  or  perhaps  demons.  But 
Froude  set  himself  to  the  praise  of  the  Tudors, 
a  much  lower  class  of  people;  ill-conditioned 
prosperous  people  who  merely  waxed  fat  and 
kicked.  Such  strength  as  Henry  VIII  had 
was  the  strength  of  a  badly  trained  horse  that 
bolts,  not  of  any  clear  or  courageous  rider  who 
controls  him.  There  is  a  sort  of  strong  man 
mentioned  in  Scripture  who,  because  he 
masters  himself,  is  more  than  he  that  takes  a 
city.  There  is  another  kind  of  strong  man 
(known  to  the  medical  profession)  who  cannot 
master  himself;  and  whom  it  may  take  half  a 
city  to  take  alive.  But  for  all  that  he  is  a 
low  lunatic,  and  not  a  hero;  and  of  that  sort 
were  too  many  of  the  heroes  whom  Froude 
attempted  to  praise.  A  kind  of  instinct  kept 
Carlyle  from  over-praising  Henry  VIII;  or 


62    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

that  highly  cultivated  and  complicated  liar, 
Queen  Elizabeth.  Here,  the  only  importance 
of  this  is  that  one  of  Carlyle's  followers  car- 
ried further  that  "strength"  which  was  the 
real  weakness  of  Carlyle.  I  have  heard  that 
Froude's  life  of  Carlyle  was  unsympathetic; 
but  if  it  was  so  it  was  a  sort  of  parricide.  For 
the  rest,  like  Macaulay,  he  was  a  picturesque 
and  partisan  historian:  but,  like  Macaulay 
(and  unlike  the  craven  scientific  historians 
of  to-day)  he  was  not  ashamed  of  being  parti- 
san or  of  being  picturesque.  Such  studies  as 
he  wrote  on  the  Elizabethan  seamen  and 
adventurers,  represent  very  triumphantly  the 
sort  of  romance  of  England  that  all  this  school 
was  attempting  to  establish;  and  link  him  up 
with  Kingsley  and  the  rest. 

Ruskin  may  be  very  roughly  regarded  as 
the  young  lieutenant  of  Carlyle  hi  his  war  on 
Utilitarian  Radicalism:  but  as  an  individual 
he  presents  many  and  curious  divergences. 
In  the  matter  of  style,  he  enriched  English 
without  disordering  it.  And  in  the  matter  of 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     63 

religion  (which  was  the  key  of  this  age  as  of 
every  other)  he  did  not,  like  Carlyle,  set  up 
the  romance  of  the  great  Puritans  as  a  rival 
to  the  romance  of  the  Catholic  Church. 
Rather  he  set  up  and  worshipped  all  the  arts 
and  trophies  of  the  Catholic  Church  as  a  rival 
to  the  Church  itself.  None  need  dispute 
that  he  held  a  perfectly  tenable  position  if  he 
chose  to  associate  early  Florentine  art  with 
a  Christianity  still  comparatively  pure,  and 
such  sensualities  as  the  Renaissance  bred  with 
the  corruption  of  a  Papacy.  But  this  does 
not  alter,  as  a  merely  artistic  fact,  the  strange 
air  of  ill-ease  and  irritation  with  which  Ruskin 
seems  to  tear  down  the  gargoyles  of  Amiens 
or  the  marbles  of  Venice,  as  things  of  which 
Europe  is  not  worthy;  and  take  them  away 
with  him  to  a  really  careful  museum,  situated 
dangerously  near  Clapham.  Many  of  the 
great  men  of  that  generation,  indeed,  had  a 
sort  of  divided  mind;  an  ethical  headache 
which  was  literally  a  "splitting  headache"; 
for  there  was  a  schism  in  the  sympathies. 


64    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

When  these  men  looked  at  some  historic 
object,  like  the  Catholic  Church  or  the  French 
Revolution,  they  did  not  know  whether  they 
loved  or  hated  it  most.  Carlyle's  two  eyes 
were  out  of  focus,  as  one  may  say,  when 
he  looked  at  democracy:  he  had  one  eye 
on  Valmy  and  the  other  on  Sedan.  In  the 
same  way,  Ruskin  had  a  strong  right  hand 
that  wrote  of  the  great  mediaeval  minsters  in 
tall  harmonies  and  traceries  as  splendid  as 
then*  own;  and  also,  so  to  speak,  a  weak  and 
feverish  left  hand  that  was  always  fidgeting 
and  trying  to  take  the  pen  away — and  write 
an  evangelical  tract  about  the  immorality  of 
foreigners.  Many  of  their  contemporaries 
were  the  same.  The  sea  of  Tennyson's  mind 
was  troubled  under  its  serene  surface.  The 
incessant  excitement  of  Kingsley,  though 
romantic  and  attractive  hi  many  ways,  was 
a  great  deal  more  like  Nervous  Christianity 
than  Muscular  Christianity.  It  would  be 
quite  unfair  to  say  of  Ruskin  that  there  was 
any  major  inconsistency  between  his  mediae- 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     65 

val  tastes  and  his  very  unmediseval  temper: 
and  minor  inconsistencies  do  not  matter  in 
anybody.  But  it  is  not  quite  unfair  to  say 
of  him  that  he  seemed  to  want  all  parts  of  the 
Cathedral  except  the  altar. 

As  an  artist  in  prose  he  is  one  of  the  most 
miraculous  products  of  the  extremely  poetical 
genius  of  England.  The  length  of  a  Ruskin 
sentence  is  like  that  length  in  the  long  arrow 
that  was  boasted  of  by  the  drawers  of  the  long 
bow.  He  draws,  not  a  cloth-yard  shaft  but 
a  long  lance  to  his  ear:  he  shoots  a  spear. 
But  the  whole  goes  light  as  a  bird  and  straight 
as  a  bullet.  There  is  no  Victorian  writer 
before  him  to  whom  he  even  suggests  a  com- 
parison, technically  considered,  except  per- 
haps De  Quincey;  who  also  employed  the 
long  rich  rolling  sentence  that,  like  a  rocket, 
bursts  into  stars  at  the  end.  But  De  Quincey 's 
sentences,  as  I  have  said,  have  always  a 
dreamy  and  insecure  sense  about  them,  like 
the  turret  on  toppling  turret  of  some  mad 
sultan's  pagoda.  Ruskin's  sentence  branches 


66     VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

into  brackets  and  relative  clauses  as  a  straight 
strong  tree  branches  into  boughs  and  bifur- 
cations, rather  shaking  off  its  burden  than 
merely  adding  to  it.  It  is  interesting  to  re- 
member that  Ruskin  wrote  some  of  the  best  of 
these  sentences  in  the  attempt  to  show  that  he 
did  understand  the  growth  of  trees,  and  that 
nobody  else  did — except  Turner,  of  course. 
It  is  also  (to  those  acquainted  with  his  per- 
verse and  wild  rhetorical  prejudices)  even 
more  amusing  to  remember  that  if  a  Ruskin 
sentence  (occupying  one  or  two  pages  of  small 
print)  does  not  remind  us  of  the  growth  of  a 
tree,  the  only  other  thing  it  does  remind  of  is 
the  triumphant  passage  of  a  railway  train. 
t  Ruskin  left  behind  him  in  his  turn  two 
quite  separate  streams  of  inspiration.  The 
first  and  more  practical  was  concerned,  like 
Carlyle's  Chartism,  with  a  challenge  to  the 
social  conclusions  of  the  orthodox  economists. 
He  was  not  so  great  a  man  as  Carlyle,  but  he 
was  a  much  more  clear-headed  man;  and  the 
point  and  stab  of  his  challenge  still  really 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     67 

stands  and  sticks,  like  a  dagger  in  a  dead  man. 
He  answered  the  theory  that  we  must  always 
get  the  cheapest  labour  we  can,  by  pointing 
out  that  we  never  do  get  the  cheapest  labour 
we  can,  in  any  matter  about  which  we  really 
care  twopence.  We  do  not  get  the  cheapest 
doctor.  We  either  get  a  doctor  who  charges 
nothing  or  a  doctor  who  charges  a  recognised 
and  respectable  fee.  We  do  not  trust  the 
cheapest  bishop.  We  do  not  allow  admirals 
to  compete.  We  do  not  tell  generals  to  un- 
dercut each  other  on  the  eve  of  a  war.  We 
either  employ  none  of  them  or  we  employ  all 
of  them  at  an  official  rate  of  pay.  All  this 
was  set  out  in  the  strongest  and  least  senti- 
mental of  his  books,  Unto  this  Last;  but 
many  suggestions  of  it  are  scattered  through 
Sesame  and  Lilies,  The  Political  Economy  of 
Art,  and  even  Modern  Painters.  On  this  side 
of  his  soul  Ruskin  became  the  second  founder 
of  Socialism.  The  argument  was  not  by  any 
means  a  complete  or  unconquerable  weapon, 
but  I  think  it  knocked  out  what  little  re- 


68     VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

mained  of  the  brains  of  the  early  Victorian 
rationalists.  It  is  entirely  nonsensical  to 
speak  of  Ruskin  as  a  lounging  aesthete,  who 
strolled  into  economics,  and  talked  senti- 
mentalism.  In  plain  fact,  Ruskin  was  seldom 
so  sensible  and  logical  (right  or  wrong)  as 
when  he  was  talking  about  economics.  He 
constantly  talked  the  most  glorious  nonsense 
about  landscape  and  natural  history,  which 
it  was  his  business  to  understand.  Within 
his  own  limits,  he  talked  the  most  cold  com- 
mon sense  about  political  economy,  which 
was  no  business  of  his  at  all. 

On  the  other  side  of  his  literary  soul,  his 
mere  unwrapping  of  the  wealth  and  wonder  of 
European  art,  he  set  going  another  influence, 
earlier  and  vaguer  than  his  influence  on 
Socialism.  He  represented  what  was  at  first 
the  Pre-Raphaelite  School  in  painting,  but 
afterwards  a  much  larger  and  looser  Pre- 
Raphaelite  School  in  poetry  and  prose.  The 
word  "looser"  will  not  be  found  unfair  if 
we  remember  how  Swinburne  and  all  the 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     69 

wildest  friends  of  the  Rossettis  carried  this 
movement  forward.  They  used  the  mediaeval 
imagery  to  blaspheme  the  mediaeval  religion. 
Ruskin's  dark  and  doubtful  decision  to  accept 
Catholic  art  but  not  Catholic  ethics  had  borne 
rapid  or  even  flagrant  fruit  by  the  time  that 
Swinburne,  writing  about  a  harlot,  composed 
a  learned  and  sympathetic  and  indecent  par- 
ody on  the  Litany  of  the  Blessed  Virgin. 

With  the  poets  I  deal  in  another  part  of  this 
book;  but  the  influence  of  Ruskin's  great 
prose  touching  art  criticism  can  best  be 
expressed  hi  the  name  of  the  next  great  prose 
writer  on  such  subjects.  That  name  is  Walter 
Pater:  and  the  name  is  the  full  measure  of 
the  extent  to  which  Ruskin's  vague  but  vast 
influence  had  escaped  from  his  hands.  Pater 
eventually  joined  the  Church  of  Rome  (which 
would  not  have  pleased  Ruskin  at  all),  but  it 
is  surely  fair  to  say  of  the  mass  of  his  work 
that  its  moral  tone  is  neither  Puritan  nor 
Catholic,  but  strictly  and  splendidly  Pagan. 
In  Pater  we  have  Ruskin  without  the  prej- 


70    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

udices,  that  is,  without  the  funny  parts.  I 
may  be  wrong,  but  I  cannot  recall  at  this 
moment  a  single  passage  in  which  Pater's 
style  takes  a  holiday  or  in  which  his  wisdom 
plays  the  fool.  Newman  and  Ruskin  were 
as  careful  and  graceful  stylists  as  he.  New- 
man and  Ruskin  were  as  serious,  elaborate, 
and  even  academic  thinkers  as  he.  But 
Ruskin  let  himself  go  about  railways.  New- 
man let  himself  go  about  Kingsley.  Pater 
cannot  let  himself  go  for  the  excellent  reason 
that  he  wants  to  stay:  to  stay  at  the  point 
where  all  the  keenest  emotions  meet,  as  he 
explains  in  the  splendid  peroration  of  The 
Renaissance.  The  only  objection  to  being 
where  all  the  keenest  emotions  meet  is  that 
you  feel  none  of  them. 

In  this  sense  Pater  may  well  stand  for  a 
substantial  summary  of  the  aesthetes,  apart 
from  the  purely  poetical  merits  of  men  like 
Rossetti  and  Swinburne.  Like  Swinburne 
and  others  he  first  attempted  to  use  mediaeval 
tradition  without  trusting  it.  These  people 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     71 

wanted  to  see  Paganism  through  Christianity: 
because  it  involved  the  incidental  amusement 
of  seeing  through  Christianity  itself.  They 
not  only  tried  to  be  in  all  ages  at  once  (which 
is  a  very  reasonable  ambition,  though  not 
often  realised),  but  they  wanted  to  be  on  all 
sides  at  once:  which  is  nonsense.  Swinburne 
tries  to  question  the  philosophy  of  Christian- 
ity hi  the  metres  of  a  Christmas  carol:  and 
Dante  Rossetti  tries  to  write  as  if  he  were 
Christina  Rossetti.  Certainly  the  almost 
successful  summit  of  all  this  attempt  is  Pater's 
superb  passage  on  the  Mona  Lisa;  in  which 
he  seeks  to  make  her  at  once  a  mystery  of 
good  and  a  mystery  of  evil.  The  philosophy 
is  false;  even  evidently  false,  for  it  bears  no 
fruit  to-day.  There  never  was  a  woman, 
not  Eve  herself  in  the  instant  of  temptation, 
who  could  smile  the  same  smile  as  the  mother 
of  Helen  and  the  mother  of  Mary.  But  it 
is  the  high-water  mark  of  that  vast  attempt 
at  an  impartiality  reached  through  art:  and 
no  other  mere  artist  ever  rose  so  high  again. 


72    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

Apart  from  this  Ruskinian  offshoot  through 
Pre-Raphaelitism  into  what  was  called 
^Estheticism,  the  remains  of  the  inspiration 
of  Carlyle  fill  a  very  large  part  in  the  Victo- 
rian life,  but  not  strictly  so  large  a  part  in  the 
Victorian  literature.  Charles  Kingsley  was 
a  great  publicist;  a  popular  preacher;  a 
popular  novelist;  and  (in  two  cases  at  least) 
a  very  good  novelist.  His  Water  Babies  is 
really  a  breezy  and  roaring  freak;  like  a 
holiday  at  the  seaside — a  holiday  where  one 
talks  natural  history  without  taking  it  seri- 
ously. Some  of  the  songs  in  this  and  other 
of  his  works  are  very  real  songs:  notably, 
"When  all  the  World  is  Young,  Lad,"  which 
comes  very  near  to  being  the  only  true  defence 
of  marriage  in  the  controversies  of  the  nine- 
teenth century.  But  when  all  this  is  allowed, 
no  one  will  seriously  rank  Kingsley,  in  the 
really  literary  sense,  on  the  level  of  Carlyle 
or  Ruskin,  Tennyson  or  Browning,  Dickens 
or  Thackeray:  and  if  such  a  place  cannot  be 
given  to  him,  it  can  be  given  even  less  to  his 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     73 

lusty  and  pleasant  friend,  Tom  Hughes, whose 
personality  floats  towards  the  frankness  of 
the  Boy's  Own  Paper;  or  to  his  deep,  sug- 
gestive metaphysical  friend  Maurice,  who 
floats  rather  towards  The  Hibbert  Journal. 
The  moral  and  social  influence  of  these  things 
is  not  to  be  forgotten:  but  they  leave  the 
domain  of  letters.  The  voice  of  Carlyle  is 
not  heard  again  in  letters  till  the  coming  of 
Kipling  and  Henley. 

One  other  name  of  great  importance  should 
appear  here,  because  it  cannot  appear  very 
appropriately  anywhere  else :  the  man  hardly 
belonged  to  the  same  school  as  Ruskin  and 
Carlyle,  but  fought  many  of  their  battles, 
and  was  even  more  concentrated  on  their 
main  task — the  task  of  convicting  liberal 
bourgeois  England  of  priggishness  and  provin- 
ciality. I  mean,  of  course,  Matthew  Arnold. 
Against  Mill's  "liberty"  and  Carlyle's 
"strength"  and  Ruskin 's  "nature,"  he  set 
up  a  new  presence  and  entity  which  he  called 
"culture,"  the  disinterested  play  of  the  mind 


74    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

through  the  sifting  of  the  best  books  and 
authorities.  Though  a  little  dandified  in 
phrase,  he  was  undoubtedly  serious  and  pub- 
lic-spirited in  intention.  He  sometimes  talked 
of  culture  almost  as  if  it  were  a  man,  or  at 
least  a  church  (for  a  church  has  a  sort  of 
personality) :  some  may  suspect  that  culture 
was  a  man,  whose  name  was  Matthew  Arnold. 
But  Arnold  was  not  only  right  but  highly 
valuable.  If  we  have  said  that  Carlyle  was 
a  man  that  saw  things,  we  may  add  that 
Arnold  was  chiefly  valuable  as  a  man  who 
knew  things.  Well  as  he  was  endowed 
intellectually,  his  power  came  more  from 
information  than  intellect.  He  simply  hap- 
pened to  know  certain  things,  that  Carlyle 
didn't  know,  that  Kingsley  didn't  know,  that 
Huxley  and  Herbert  Spencer  didn't  know: 
that  England  didn't  know.  He  knew  that 
England  was  a  part  of  Europe:  and  not  so 
important  a  part  as  it  had  been  the  morning 
after  Waterloo.  He  knew  that  England  was 
then  (as  it  is  now)  an  oligarchical  State,  and 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     75 

that  many  great  nations  are  not.  He  knew 
that  a  real  democracy  need  not  live  and  does 
not  live  in  that  perpetual  panic  about  using 
the  powers  of  the  State,  which  possessed  men 
like  Spencer  and  Cobden.  He  knew  a  rational 
minimum  of  culture  and  common  courtesy 
could  exist  and  did  exist  throughout  large 
democracies.  He  knew  the  Catholic  Church 
had  been  in  history  "the  Church  of  the  multi- 
tude": he  knew  it  was  not  a  sect.  He  knew 
that  great  landlords  are  no  more  a  part  of  the 
economic  law  than  nigger-drivers:  he  knew 
that  small  owners  could  and  did  prosper.  He 
was  not  so  much  the  philosopher  as  the  man 
of  the  world:  he  reminded  us  that  Europe 
was  a  society  while  Ruskin  was  treating  it  as 
a  picture  gallery.  He  was  a  sort  of  Heaven- 
sent courier.  His  frontal  attack  on  the  vulgar 
and  sullen  optimism  of  Victorian  utility  may 
be  summoned  up  in  the  admirable  sentence,  in 
which  he  asked  the  English  what  was  the  use 
of  a  train  taking  them  quickly  from  Islington 
to  Camberwell,  if  it  only  took  them  "from  a 


76    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

dismal  and  illiberal  life  in  Islington  to  a  dis- 
mal and  illiberal  life  in  Camberwell?" 

His  attitude  to  that  great  religious  enigma 
round  which  all  these  great  men  were  grouped 
as  in  a  ring,  was  individual  and  decidedly 
curious.  He  seems  to  have  believed  that  a 
"Historic  Church,"  that  is,  some  established 
organisation  with  ceremonies  and  sacred  books, 
etc.,  could  be  perpetually  preserved  as  a  sort 
of  vessel  to  contain  the  spiritual  ideas  of  the 
age,  whatever  those  ideas  might  happen  to 
be.  He  clearly  seems  to  have  contemplated 
a  melting  away  of  the  doctrines  of  the  Church 
and  even  of  the  meaning  of  the  words:  but 
he  thought  a  certain  need  in  man  would  al- 
ways be  best  satisfied  by  public  worship  and 
especially  by  the  great  religious  literatures  of 
the  past.  He  would  embalm  the  body  that 
it  might  often  be  revisited  by  the  soul — or 
souls.  Something  of  the  sort  has  been 
suggested  by  Dr.  Coit  and  others  of  the 
ethical  societies  in  our  own  time.  But  while 
Arnold  would  loosen  the  theological  bonds  of 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     77 

the  Church,  he  would  not  loosen  the  official 
bonds  of  the  State.  You  must  not  disestab- 
lish the  Church:  you  must  not  even  leave  the 
Church:  you  must  stop  inside  it  and  think 
what  you  choose.  Enemies  might  say  that 
he  was  simply  trying  to  establish  and  endow 
Agnosticism.  It  is  fairer  and  truer  to  say  that 
unconsciously  he  was  trying  to  restore  Pagan- 
ism: for  this  State  Ritualism  without  theol- 
ogy, and  without  much  belief,  actually  was 
the  practice  of  the  ancient  world.  Arnold 
may  have  thought  that  he  was  building  an 
altar  to  the  Unknown  God;  but  he  was 
really  building  it  to  Divus  Caesar. 

As  a  critic  he  was  chiefly  concerned  to 
preserve  criticism  itself;  to  set  a  measure  to 
praise  and  blame  and  support  the  classics 
against  the  fashions.  It  is  here  that  it  is 
specially  true  of  him,  if  of  no  writer  else,  that 
the  style  was  the  man.  The  most  vital  thing 
he  invented  was  a  new  style:  founded  on  the 
patient  unravelling  of  the  tangled  Victorian 
ideas,  as  if  they  were  matted  hah*  under  a 


78    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

comb.  He  did  not  mind  how  elaborately  long 
he  made  a  sentence,  so  long  as  he  made  it 
clear.  He  would  constantly  repeat  whole 
phrases  word  for  word  in  the  same  sentence, 
rather  than  risk  ambiguity  by  abbreviation. 
His  genius  showed  itself  in  turning  this  method 
of  a  laborious  lucidity  into  a  peculiarly  ex- 
asperating form  of  satire  and  controversy. 
Newman's  strength  was  in  a  sort  of  stifled 
passion,  a  dangerous  patience  of  polite  logic 
and  then:  "Cowards!  if  I  advanced  a  step 
you  would  run  away:  it  is  not  you  I  fear. 
Di  me  terrent,  et  Jupiter  hostis."  If  Newman 
seemed  suddenly  to  fly  into  a  temper,  Carlyle 
seemed  never  to  fly  out  of  one.  But  Arnold 
kept  a  smile  of  heart-broken  forbearance,  as 
of  the  teacher  in  an  idiot  school,  that  was 
enormously  insulting.  One  trick  he  often  tried 
with  success.  If  his  opponent  had  said  some- 
thing foolish,  like  "the  destiny  of  England  is 
in  the  great  heart  of  England,"  Arnold  would 
repeat  the  phrase  again  and  again  until  it 
looked  more  foolish  than  it  really  was.  Thus 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     79 

he  recurs  again  and  again  to  "the  British 
College  of  Health  in  the  New  Road"  till  the 
reader  wants  to  rush  out  and  burn  the  place 
down.  Arnold's  great  error  was  that  he  some- 
times thus  wearied  us  of  his  own  phrases,  as 
well  as  of  his  enemies'. 

These  names  are  roughly  representative  of 
the  long  series  of  protests  against  the  cold 
commercial  rationalism  which  held  Parlia- 
ment and  the  schools  through  the  earlier  Vic- 
torian tune,  in  so  far  as  those  protests  were 
made  in  the  name  of  neglected  intellect,  in- 
sulted art,  forgotten  heroism  and  desecrated 
religion.  But  already  the  Utilitarian  citadel 
had  been  more  heavily  bombarded  on  the 
other  side  by  one  lonely  and  unlettered  man 
of  genius. 

The  rise  of  Dickens  is  like  the  rising  of  a 
vast  mob.  This  is  not  only  because  his  tales 
are  indeed  as  crowded  and  populous  as  towns: 
for  truly  it  was  not  so  much  that  Dickens 
appeared  as  that  a  hundred  Dickens  char- 
acters appeared.  It  is  also  because  he  was 


80    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

the  sort  of  man  who  has  the  impersonal 
impetus  of  a  mob :  what  Poe  meant  when  he 
truly  said  that  popular  rumour,  if  really 
spontaneous,  was  like  the  intuition  of  the 
individual  man  of  genius.  Those  who  speak 
scornfully  of  the  ignorance  of  the  mob  do 
not  err  as  to  the  fact  itself;  their  error  is  in 
not  seeing  that  just  as  a  crowd  is  compara- 
tively ignorant,  so  a  crowd  is  comparatively 
innocent.  It  will  have  the  old  and  human 
faults;  but  it  is  not  likely  to  specialise  in  the 
special  faults  of  that  particular  society: 
because  the  effort  of  the  strong  and  successful 
in  all  ages  is  to  keep  the  poor  out  of  society. 
If  the  higher  castes  have  developed  some 
special  moral  beauty  or  grace,  as  they  occa- 
sionally do  (for  instance,  mediaeval  chivalry), 
it  is  likely  enough,  of  course,  that  the  mass  of 
men  will  miss  it.  But  if  they  have  developed 
some  perversion  or  over-emphasis,  as  they 
much  more  often  do  (for  instance,  the  Re- 
naissance poisoning),  then  it  will  be  the  ten- 
dency of  the  mass  of  men  to  miss  that  too. 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     81 

The  point  might  be  put  in  many  ways;  you 
may  say  if  you  will  that  the  poor  are  always 
at  the  tail  of  the  procession,  and  that  whether 
they  are  morally  worse  or  better  depends  on 
whether  humanity  as  a  whole  is  proceeding 
towards  heaven  or  hell.  When  humanity  is 
going  to  hell,  the  poor  are  always  nearest  to 
heaven. 

Dickens  was  a  mob — and  a  mob  in  revolt; 
he  fought  by  the  light  of  nature;  he  had 
not  a  theory,  but  a  thirst.  If  any  one  chooses 
to  offer  the  cheap  sarcasm  that  his  thirst 
was  largely  a  thirst  for  milk-punch,  I  am 
content  to  reply  with  complete  gravity  and 
entire  contempt  that  in  a  sense  this  is  per- 
fectly true.  His  thirst  was  for  things  as 
humble,  as  human,  as  laughable  as  that  daily 
bread  for  which  we  cry  to  God.  He  had  no 
particular  plan  of  reform;  or,  when  he  had, 
it  was  startlingly  petty  and  parochial  com- 
pared with  the  deep,  confused  clamour  of 
comradeship  and  insurrection  that  fills  all  his 
narrative.  It  would  not  be  gravely  unjust  to 


82  '  VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

him  to  compare  him  to  his  own  heroine, 
Arabella  Allen,  who  "didn't  know  what  she 
did  like,"  but  who  (when  confronted  with 
Mr.  Bob  Sawyer)  "did  know  what  she  didn't 
like."  Dickens  did  know  what  he  didn't  like. 
He  didn't  like  the  Unrivalled  Happiness 
which  Mr.  Roebuck  praised;  the  economic 
laws  that  were  working  so  faultlessly  in  Fever 
Alley;  the  wealth  that  was  accumulating  so 
rapidly  in  Bleeding  Heart  Yard.  But,  above 
all,  he  didn't  like  the  mean  side  of  the  Man- 
chester philosophy:  the  preaching  of  an  im- 
possible thrift  and  an  intolerable  temperance. 
He  hated  the  implication  that  because  a  man 
was  a  miser  in  Latin  he  must  also  be  a  miser 
in  English.  And  this  meanness  of  the  Utili- 
tarians had  gone  very  far — infecting  many 
finer  minds  who  had  fought  the  Utilitarians. 
In  the  Edinburgh  Review,  a  thing  like  Malthus 
could  be  championed  by  a  man  like  Macaulay. 
The  twin  root  facts  of  the  revolution  called 
Dickens  are  these:  first,  that  he  attacked  the 
cold  Victorian  compromise;  second,  that  he 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE       83 

attacked  it  without  knowing  he  was  doing 
it — certainly  without  knowing  that  other 
people  were  doing  it.  He  was  attacking 
something  which  we  will  call  Mr.  Gradgrind. 
He  was  utterly  unaware  (in  any  essential 
sense)  that  any  one  else  had  attacked  Mr. 
Gradgrind.  All  the  other  attacks  had  come 
from  positions  of  learning  or  cultured  eccen- 
tricity of  which  he  was  entirely  ignorant, 
and  to  which,  therefore  (like  a  spirited  fellow), 
he  felt  a  furious  hostility.  Thus,  for  instance, 
he  hated  that  Little  Bethel  to  which  Kit's 
mother  went:  he  hated  it  simply  as  Kit 
hated  it.  Newman  could  have  told  him  it  was 
hateful,  because  it  had  no  root  in  religious 
history;  it  was  not  even  a  sapling  sprung  of 
the  seed  of  some  great  human  and  heathen 
tree:  it  was  a  monstrous  mushroom  that 
grows  in  the  moonshine  and  dies  in  the  dawn. 
Dickens  knew  no  more  of  religious  history 
than  Kit;  he  simply  smelt  the  fungus,  and  it 
stank.  Thus,  again,  he  hated  that  insolent 
luxury  of  a  class  counting  itself  a  comfortable 


84    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

exception  to  all  mankind;  he  hated  it  as 
Kate  Nickleby  hated  Sir  Mulberry  Hawke — 
by  instinct.  Carlyle  could  have  told  him 
that  all  the  world  was  full  of  that  anger 
against  the  impudent  fatness  of  the  few. 
But  when  Dickens  wrote  about  Kate  Nick- 
leby, he  knew  about  as  much  of  the  world — • 
as  Kate  Nickleby.  He  did  write  The  Tale  of 
Two  Cities  long  afterwards;  but  that  was 
when  he  had  been  instructed  by  Carlyle.  His 
first  revolutionism  was  as  private  and  inter- 
nal as  feeling  sea-sick.  Thus,  once  more,  he 
wrote  against  Mr.  Gradgrind  long  before  he 
created  him.  In  The  Chimes,  conceived  in 
quite  his  casual  and  charitable  season,  with 
the  Christmas  Carol  and  the  Cricket  on  the 
Hearth,  he  hit  hard  at  the  economists.  Bus- 
kin, in  the  same  fashion,  would  have  told  him 
that  the  worst  thing  about  the  economists  was 
that  they  were  not  economists:  that  they 
missed  many  essential  things  even  in  eco- 
nomics. But  Dickens  did  not  know  whether 
they  were  economists  or  not:  he  only  knew 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     85 

that  they  wanted  hitting.  Thus,  to  take  a 
last  case  out  of  many,  Dickens  travelled  in  a 
French  railway  train,  and  noticed  that  this 
eccentric  nation  provided  him  with  wine  that 
he  could  drink  and  sandwiches  he  could  eat, 
and  manners  he  could  tolerate.  And  remem- 
bering the  ghastly  sawdust-eating  waiting- 
rooms  of  the  North  English  railways,  he 
wrote  that  rich  chapter  in  Mugby  Junction. 
Matthew  Arnold  could  have  told  him  that 
this  was  but  a  part  of  the  general  thinning 
down  of  European  civilisation  in  these  islands 
at  the  edge  of  it;  that  for  two  or  three  thou- 
sand years  the  Latin  society  has  learnt  how  to 
drink  wine,  and  how  not  to  drink  too  much 
of  it.  Dickens  did  not  in  the  least  under- 
stand the  Latin  society:  but  he  did  under- 
stand the  wine.  If  (to  prolong  an  idle  but 
not  entirely  false  metaphor)  we  have  called 
Carlyle  a  man  who  saw  and  Arnold  a  man  who 
knew,  we  might  truly  call  Dickens  a  man 
who  tasted,  that  is,  a  man  who  really  felt. 
In  spite  of  all  the  silly  talk  about  his  vulgarity, 


86    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

he  really  had,  in  the  strict  and  serious  sense, 
good  taste.  All  real  good  taste  is  gusto — 
the  power  of  appreciating  the  presence — or 
the  absence — of  a  particular  and  positive 
pleasure.  He  had  no  learning;  he  was  not 
misled  by  the  label  on  the  bottle — for  that 
is  what  learning  largely  meant  in  his  time. 
He  opened  his  mouth  and  shut  his  eyes  and 
saw  what  the  Age  of  Reason  would  give  him. 
And,  having  tasted  it,  he  spat  it  out. 

I  am  constrained  to  consider  Dickens  here 
among  the  fighters;  though  I  ought  (on  the 
pure  principles  of  Art)  to  be  considering  him 
in  the  chapter  which  I  have  allotted  to  the 
story-tellers.  But  we  should  get  the  whole 
Victorian  perspective  wrong,  in  my  opinion 
at  least,  if  we  did  not  see  that  Dickens  was 
primarily  the  most  successful  of  all  the 
onslaughts  on  the  solid  scientific  school;  be- 
cause he  did  not  attack  from  the  standpoint 
of  extraordinary  faith,  like  Newman;  or  the 
standpoint  of  extraordinary  inspiration,  like 
Carlyle;  or  the  standpoint  of  extraordinary 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     87 

detachment  or  serenity,  like  Arnold ;  but  from 
the  standpoint  of  quite  ordinary  and  quite 
hearty  dislike.  To  give  but  one  instance 
more,  Matthew  Arnold,  trying  to  carry  into 
England  constructive  educational  schemes 
which  he  could  see  spread  like  a  clear  railway 
map  all  over  the  Continent,  was  much 
badgered  about  what  he  really  thought  was 
wrong  with  English  middle-class  education. 
Despairing  of  explaining  to  the  English 
middle  class  the  idea  of  high  and  central 
public  instruction,  as  distinct  from  coarse 
and  hole-and-corner  private  instruction,  he 
invoked  the  aid  of  Dickens.  He  said  the 
English  middle-class  school  was  the  sort  of 
school  where  Mr.  Creakle  sat,  with  his  but- 
tered toast  and  his  cane.  Now  Dickens  had 
probably  never  seen  any  other  kind  of  school 
— certainly  he  had  never  understood  the  sys- 
tematic State  Schools  in  which  Arnold  had 
learnt  his  lesson.  But  he  saw  the  cane  and  the 
buttered  toast,  and  he  knew  that  it  was  all 
wrong.  In  this  sense,  Dickens,  the  great 


88    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE  , 

romanticist,  is  truly  the  great  realist  also. 
For  he  had  no  abstractions:  he  had  nothing 
except  realities  out  of  which  to  make  a 
romance. 

With  Dickens,  then,  re-arises  that  reality 
with  which  I  began  and  which  (curtly,  but 
I  think  not  falsely)  I  have  called  Cobbett. 
In  dealing  with  fiction  as  such,  I  shall  have 
occasion  to  say  wherein  Dickens  is  weaker 
and  stronger  than  that  England  of  the 
eighteenth  century:  here  it  is  sufficient  to 
say  that  he  represents  the  return  of  Cobbett 
in  this  vital  sense;  that  he  is  proud  of  being 
the  ordinary  man.  No  one  can  understand 
the  thousand  caricatures  by  Dickens  who  does 
not  understand  that  he  is  comparing  them 
all  with  his  own  common  sense.  Dickens, 
in  the  bulk,  liked  the  things  that  Cobbett 
had  liked;  what  is  perhaps  more  to  the  point, 
he  hated  the  things  that  Cobbett  had  hated; 
the  Tudors,  the  lawyers,  the  leisurely  oppres- 
sion of  the  poor.  Cobbett's  fine  fighting 
journalism  had  been  what  is  nowadays  called 


THE  VICTORIAN  COMPROMISE     89 

"personal,"  that  is,  it  supposed  human  beings 
to  be  human.  But  Cobbett  was  also  personal 
in  the  less  satisfactory  sense;  he  could  only 
multiply  monsters  who  were  exaggerations 
of  his  enemies  or  exaggerations  of  himself. 
Dickens  was  personal  in  a  more  godlike  sense; 
he  could  multiply  persons.  He  could  create 
all  the  farce  and  tragedy  of  his  age  over  again, 
with  creatures  unborn  to  sin  and  creatures 
unborn  to  suffer.  That  which  had  not  been 
achieved  by  the  fierce  facts  of  Cobbett,  the 
burning  dreams  of  Carlyle,  the  white-hot 
proofs  of  Newman,  was  really  or  very  nearly 
achieved  by  a  crowd  of  impossible  people. 
In  the  centre  stood  that  citadel  of  atheist 
industrialism:  and  if  indeed  it  has  ever  been 
taken,  it  was  taken  by  the  rush  of  that  unreal 
army. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS 

THE  Victorian  novel  was  a  thing  entirely 
Victorian;  quite  unique  and  suited  to  a  sort 
of  cosiness  in  that  country  and  that  age. 
But  the  novel  itself,  though  not  merely 
Victorian,  is  mainly  modern.  No  clear- 
headed person  wastes  his  time  over  defini- 
tions, except  where  he  thinks  his  own  defini- 
tion would  probably  be  in  dispute.  I  merely 
say,  therefore,  that  when  I  say  "novel," 
I  mean  a  fictitious  narrative  (almost  invari- 
ably, but  not  necessarily,  in  prose)  of  which 
the  essential  is  that  the  story  is  not  told  for 
the  sake  of  its  naked  pointedness  as  an  anec- 
dote, or  for  the  sake  of  the  irrelevant  land- 
scapes and  visions  that  can  be  caught  up 
in  it,  but  for  the  sake  of  some  study  of  the 
difference  between  human  beings.  There  are 

90 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS     91 

several  things  that  make  this  mode  of  art 
unique.  One  of  the  most  confipini™1"  1>g  f1hat 
it  is  the  art  in  which  the  conflicts  of  woman 
nj»f>  niiitf*  Kf>yr>nrl  pont.royprsy,  The  prODOSl- 

tion  that  Victorian  women  have  done  well  in 
politics  and  philosophy  is  not  necessarily  an 
untrue  proposition;  but  it  is  a  partisan  prop- 
osition. I  never  heard  that  many  women, 
let  alone  men,  shared  the  views  of  Mary  Woll- 
stonecraft;  I  never  heard  that  millions  of 
believers  flocked  to  the  religion  tentatively 
founded  by  Miss  Frances  Power  Cobbe.  They 
did,  undoubtedly,  flock  to  Mrs.  Eddy;  but 
it  will  not  be  unfair  to  that  lady  to  call  her 
following  a  sect,  and  not  altogether  unreason- 
able to  say  that  such  insane  exceptions  prove 
the  rule.  Nor  can  I  at  this  moment  think  of  a 
single  modern  woman  writing  on  politics  or 
abstract  things,  whose  work  is  of  undisputed 
importance;  except  perhaps  Mrs.  Sidney 
Webb,  who  settles  things  by  the  simple  pro- 
cess of  ordering  about  the  citizens  of  a  state, 
as  she  might  the  servants  in  a  kitchen.  There 


92    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

has  been,  at  any  rate,  no  writer  on  moral  or 
political  theory  that  can  be  mentioned,  with- 
out seeming  comic,  in  the  same  breath  with 
the  great  female  novelists.  But  when  we 
come  to  the  novelists,  the  women  have,  on 
the  whole,  equality;  and  certainly,  in  some 
points,  superiority.  Jane  Austen  is  as  strong 
in  her  own  way  as  Scott  is  in  his.  But  she  is, 
for  all  practical  purposes,  never  weak  in  her 
own  way — and  Scott  very  often  is.  Charlotte 
Bronte  dedicated  Jane  Eyre  to  the  author  of 
Vanity  Fair.  I  should  hesitate  to  say  that 
Charlotte  Bronte's  is  a  better  book  than 
Thackeray's,  but  I  think  it  might  well 
be  maintained  that  it  is  a  better  story.  All 
sorts  of  inquiring  asses  (equally  ignorant 
of  the  old  nature  of  woman  and  the  new 
nature  of  the  novel)  whispered  wisely  that 
George  Eliot's  novels  were  really  written  by 
George  Lewes.  I  will  cheerfully  answer  for 
the  fact  that,  if  they  had  been  written  by 
George  Lewes,  no  one  would  ever  have  read 
them.  Those  who  have  read  his  book  on 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS     93 

Robespierre  will  have  no  doubt  about  my 
meaning.  I  am  no  idolater  of  George  Eliot; 
but  a  man  who  could  concoct  such  a  crushing 
opiate  about  the  most  exciting  occasion  in  his- 
tory certainly  did  not  write  The  Mill  on  the 
Floss.  This  is  the  first  fact  about  the  novel, 
that  it  is  the  introduction  of  a  new  and  rather 
curious  kind  of  art;  and  it  has  been  found  to 
be  peculiarly  feminine,  from  the  first  good 
novel  by  Fanny  Burney  to  the  last  good  novel 
by  Miss  May  Sinclair.  The  truth  is,  I  think, 
that  the  modern  novel  is  a  new  thing;  not 
new  hi  its  essence  (for  that  is  a  philosophy  for 
fools),  but  new  in  the  sense  that  it  lets  loose 
many  of  the  things  that  are  old.  It  is  a 
hearty  and  exhaustive  overhauling  of  that 
part  of  human  existence  which  has  always 
been  the  woman's  province,  or  rather  king- 
dom; the  play  of  personalities  hi  private,  the 
real  difference  between  Tommy  and  Joe.  It 
is  right  that  womanhood  should  spppialisft  in 
individuals,  and  be  praised  foy  doing  so;  just 
as  in  the  Middle  Ages  she  specialised  in 


94     VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

dignity  and  was  praised  for  doing  so.  People 
put  the  matter  wrong  when  they  say  that  the 
novel  is  a  study  of  human  nature.  Human 
nature  is  a  thing  that  even  men  can  under- 
stand. Human  nature  is  born  of  the  pain 
of  a  woman;  human  nature  plays  at  peep-bo 
when  it  is  two  and  at  cricket  when  it  is  twelve; 
human  nature  earns  its  living  and  desires 
the  other  sex  and  dies.  Wfr.at  the  novel 
deals  with  is  what  women  have  to  deal 
with:  the  differentiationsT  the  twists  and 
turns  of  this  eternal  river.  Tbf?  key  of  this 
•ne w  form  of  grt,  which  we  call  fiction,  is  sym- 
pathy. And  sympathy  does  not  mean  so 
much  feeling  with  all  who  feel,  but  rather 
yiflWingf  with  3,^1  who  suffer.  And  it  was  in- 
evitable, under  such  an  inspiration,  that  more 
attention  should  be  given  to  the  awkward 
corners  of  life  than  to  its  even  flow.  The  very 
promising  domestic  channel  dug  by  the  Vic- 
torian women,  in  books  like  Cranford,  by  Mrs. 
Gaskell,  would  have  got  to  the  sea,  if  they  had 
been  left  alone  to  dig  it.  They  might  have 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS     95 

made  domesticity  a  fairyland.  Unfortunately 
another  idea,  the  idea  of  imitating  men's 
cuffs  and  collars  and  documents,  cut  across 
this  purely  female  discovery  and  destroyed  it. 
It  may  seem  mere  praise  of 


say  itjs  the  art  of  sympathy  anr]  thp  study 
T>f  human  variations  ,  But  indeed,  though 
this  is  a  good  thing,  it  is  not  universally  good. 
We  have  gained  in  sympathy;  but  we  have 
lost  in  brotherhood.  Old  quarrels  had  more 
equality  than  modern  exonerations.  Two 
peasants  hi  the  Middle  Ages  quarrelled  about 
their  two  fields.  But  they  went  to  the  same 
church,  served  in  the  same  semi-feudal  militia, 
and  had  the  same  morality,  which  ever  might 
happen  to  be  breaking  it  at  the  moment. 
The  very  cause  of  their  quarrel  was  the  cause 
of  their  fraternity;  they  both  liked  land. 
But  suppose  one  of  them  a  teetotaler  who 
desired  the  abolition  of  hops  on  both  farms; 
suppose  the  other  a  vegetarian  who  desired 
the  abolition  of  chickens  on  both  farms  :  and 
it  is  at  once  apparent  that  a  quarrel  of  quite 


96    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

a  different  kind  would  begin;  and  that  in 
that  quarrel  it  would  not  be  a  question  of 
farmer  against  farmer,  but  of  individual 
against  individual.  T^is  fundamental  sense 
of  human  fraternity  can  only  exist  in  the 
presence  of  positive  religion.  Man  is  merely 
man  only  when  he  is  seen  against  the  sky. 
If  he  is  seen  against  any  landscape,  he  is 
only  a  man  of  that  land.  If  he  is  seen  against 
any  house,  he  is  only  a  householder.  <pnTy 
where  death  and  eternity  are  intensely  pres- 
ent, fflti  human  beings  fully  feel  their  fellow- 
sjiip.  Once  the  divine  darkness  against  which 
we  stand  is  really  dismissed  from  the  mind  (as 
it  was  very  nearly  dismissed  in  the  Victorian 
time)  the  differences  between  human  beings 
become  overpoweringly  plain;  whether  they 
are  expressed  in  the  high  caricatures  of 
Dickens  or  the  low  lunacies  of  Zola. 

This  can  be  seen  in  a  sort  of  picture  in  the 
Prologue  of  the  Canterbury  Tales;  which  is 
already  pregnant  with  the  promise  of  the 
English  novel.  The  characters  there  are 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS     97 

at  once  graphically  and  delicately  differ- 
entiated; the  Doctor  with  his  rich  cloak,  his 
careful  meals,  his  coldness  to  religion;  the 
Franklin,  whose  white  beard  was  so  fresh 
that  it  recalled  the  daisies,  and  in  whose 
house  it  snowed  meat  and  drink;  the  Sum- 
moner,  from  whose  fearful  face,  like  a  red 
cherub's,  the  children  fled,  and  who  wore  a 
garland  like  a  hoop;  the  Miller  with  his 
short  red  hair  and  bagpipes  and  brutal  head, 
with  which  he  could  break  down  a  door;  the 
Lover  who  was  as  sleepless  as  a  nightingale; 
the  Knight,  the  Cook,  the  Clerk  of  Oxford. 
Pendennis  or  the  Cook,  M.  Mirabolant,  is 
nowhere  so  vividly  varied  by  a  few  merely 
verbal  strokes.  But  the  great  difference  is 
deeper  and  more  striking.  It  is  simply  that 
Pendennis  would  never  have  gone  riding  with 
a  cook  at  all.  Chaucer's  knight  rode  with  a 
cook  quite  naturally;  because  the  thing  they 
were  all  seeking  together  was  as  much  above 
knighthood  as  it  was  above  cookery.  Soldiers 
and  swindlers  and  bullies  and  outcasts,  they 


98     VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

were  all  going  to  the  shrine  of  a  distant  saint. 
To  what  sort  of  distant  saint  would  Pendennis 
and  Colonel  Newcome  and  Mr.  Moss  and 
Captain  Costigan  and  Ridley  the  butler  and 
Bayham  and  Sir  Barnes  Newcome  and  Laura 
and  the  Duchess  d'lvry  and  Warrington  and 
Captain  Blackball  and  Lady  Kew  travel, 
laughing  and  telling  tales  together? 

The  growth  of  the  novel,  therefore,  must 
not  be  too  easily  called  an  increase  in  the 
interest  in  humanity.  It  is  an  increase  in 
the  interest  in  the  things  in  which  men  differ; 
much  fuller  and  finer  work  had  been  done 
before  about  the  things  in  which  they  agree. 
And  this. intense  interest  in  variety  had  its 
bad  side  as  well  as  its  good;  it  has  rather 
increased  social  distinctions  in  a  serious  and 
spiritual  sense.  Most  of  the  oblivion  of 
democracy  is  due  to  the  oblivion  of  death. 
But  in  its  own  manner  and  measure,  it  was  a 
real  advance  and  experiment  of  the  European 
mind,  like  the  public  art  of  the  Renaissance 
or  the  fairyland  of  physical  science  explored 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS     99 

in  the  nineteenth  century.  It  was  a  more 
unquestionable  benefit  than  these:  and  in 
that  development  women  played  a  peculiar 
part,  English  women  especially,  and  Victorian 
women  most  of  all. 

It  is  perhaps  partly,  though  certainly  not 
entirely, 


writers  that  explains  another  very  arresting 
and  important  fact  about  the  emergence  of 
genuinely  Victorian  fiction.  It  had  been  by 
this  time  decided,  by  the  powers  that  had 
influence  (and  by  public  opinion  also,  at 
least  in  the  middle-class  sense),  that  certain 
verbal  limits  must  be  set  to  such  literature. 
The  novel  must  be  what  some  would  call 
pure  and  others  would  call  prudish;  but  what 
is  not,  properly  considered,  either  one  or  the 
other:  it  is  rather  a  more  or  less  business 
proposal  (right  or  wrong)  that  every  writer 
shall  draw  the  line  at  literal  physical  descrip- 
tion of  things  socially  concealed.  It  was 
originally  merely  verbal;  it  had  not,  prima- 
rily, any  dream  of  purifying  the  topic  or  the 


100   VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

moral  tone.  I)lckens  and  Thackeray_c]aimed 
very  properly  the  right  to  deal  with  shameful 
passions  and  suggest  their  shameful_culmi- 
Trations;  Scott  sometimes  dealt  with  ideas 
positively  horrible — as  in  that  grand  Glen- 
allan  tragedy  which  is  as  appalling  as  the 
(Edipus  or  The  Cenci.  None  of  these  great 
men  would  have  tolerated  for  a  moment  being 
talked  to  (as  the  muddle-headed  amateur 
censors  talk  to  artists  to-day)  about  "whole- 
some" topics  and  suggestions  "that  cannot 
elevate."  They  had  to  describe  the  great 
battle  of  good  and  evil  and  they  described 
both;  but  they  accepted  a  working  Victorian 
compromise  about  what  should  happen  be- 
hind tJlft  flCCTiea  fl/nd  what  on  the-  stage. 

Dickens  did  not  claim  the  license  of  diction 
Fielding  might  have  claimed  in  repeating  the 
senile  ecstasies  of  Gride  (let  us  say)  over  his 
purchased  bride:  but  Dickens  does  not  leave 
the  reader  in  the  faintest  doubt  about  what 
sort  of  feelings  they  were;  nor  is  there  any 
reason  why  he  should.  Thackeray  would  not 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    101 

have  described  the  toilet  details  of  the  secret 
balls  of  Lord  Steyne:  he  left  that  to  Lady 
Cardigan.  But  no  one  who  had  read  Thack- 
eray's version  would  be  surprised  at  Lady 
Cardigan's.  But  though  the  great  Victorian 
novelists  would  not  have  permitted  the  impu- 
dence of  the  suggestion  that  every  part  of 
their  problem  must  be  wholesome  and  in- 
nocent in  itself,  it  is  still  tenable  (I  do  not 
say  it  is  certain)  that  by^yielHing  to  the 
Philistines  on  this  verbal  compromise,  they 
have  in  the  long  run  worked  for  impurity 
ratjier  than  purity.  In  one  point  T  Hn  cer- 
tainly thinkJjiaJL.  Victorian  BfKwdlerism  did 
pure  harm.  This  is  the  simple  point  that, 
t\Wft  times  out  of  ten,  the  coarse  word  is 
the  word  that  condemns  an  evil  and—the 
refined  wnrH  flip  word  that,  excuses  it.  A 
common  evasion,  for  instance,  substitutes  for 
the  word  that  brands  self -sale  as  the  essential 
sin,  a  word  which  weakly  suggests  that  it  is 
no  more  wicked  than  walking  down  the  street. 
The  great  peril  of  such  soft  mystifications  is 


102    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

that  extreme  evils  (they  that  are  abnormal 
even  by  the  standard  of  evil)  have  a  very 
long  start.  Where  ordinary  wrong  is  made 
unintelligible,  extraordinary  wrong  can  count 
on  remaining  more  unintelligible  still;  espe- 
cially among  those  who  live  in  such  an  atmos- 
phere of  long  words.  It  is  a  cruel  comment 
on  the  purity  of  the  Victorian  Age,  that  the 
age  ended  (save  for  the  bursting  of  a  single 
scandal)  in  a  thing  being  everywhere  called 
"Art,"  "The  Greek  Spirit,"  "The  Platonic 
Ideal"  and  so  on — which  any  navvy  mend- 
ing the  road  outside  would  have  stamped 
with  a  word  as  vile  and  as  vulgar  as  it 
deserved. 

This  reticence,  right  or  wrong,  may  have 
been  connected  with  the  participation  of 
women  with  men  in  the  matter  of  fiction.  It 
fe  an  important  point:  the  sexes  can  only  be 
coarse  separately.  It  was  certainly  also  due, 
as  I  have  already  suggested,  to  the  treaty 
between  the  rich  bourgeoisie  and  the  old 
aristocracy,  which  both  had  to  make,  for  the 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    103 

common  and  congenial  purpose  of  keeping 
the  English  people  down.  But  it  jsas-due 
much  more  than  this  to  a  general  moral 
atmosphere  in  ^e  Victorian  Age.  It  is 
impossible  to  express  that  spirit  except  by 
the  electric  bell  of  a  name.  It  wasr  latitudi- 
narian,  and  yet  it  was  limited.  It  could  be 
content  with  nothing  less  than  the  whole 
cosmos:  yet  the  cosmos  with  which  it  was 
content  was  small.  It  is  false  to  say  it  was 
without  humour :  yet  there  was  something  by 
instinct  unsmiling  in  it.  It  was  always  saying 
solidly  that  things  were  "enough";  and 
proving  by  that  sharpness  (as  of  the  shutting 
of  a  door)  that  they  were  not  enough.  It 
took,  I  will  not  say  its  pleasures,  but  even  its 
emancipations,  sadly.  Definitions  seem  to 
escape  this  way  and  that  in  the  attempt  to 
locate  it  as  an  idea.  But  every  one  will 
understand  me  if  I  call  it  George  Eliot. 

I  begin  with  this  great  woman  of  letters 
for  both  the  two  reasons  already  mentioned. 
Sl^e  reresents  the  rationalism  QiE  the  old 


104    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

Victorian  Age  at  its  highest.  She  and  Mill 
are  like  two  great  mountains  at  the  end  of 
that  long,  hard  chain  which  is  the  watershed 
of  the  Early  Victorian  time.  They  alone  rise 
high  enough  to  be  confused  among  the  clouds 
— or  perhaps  confused  among  the  stars.  They 
certainly  were  seeking  truth,  as  Newman  and 
Carlyle  were;  the  slow  slope  of  the  later 
Victorian  vulgarity  does  not  lower  their 
precipice  and  pinnacle.  But  I.foegin  with  this 
name  also  because  it  emphasises  the  idea  of 
fiction  a.s  a.  fr^sh  and  largely  a  female 
The-jiovel  of  the  nineteenth  century 
was  female:  as  fully  as  the  novel  of  the 
eighteenth  century  was  male.  It  is  quite 
certain  that  no  woman  could  have  written 
Roderick  Random.  It  is  not  quite  so  certain 
that  no  woman  could  have  written  Esmond. 
The  strength  and  subtlety  of  woman  had 
certainly  sunk  deep  into  English  letters  when 
George  Eliot  began  to  write. 

Her  originals  and  even  her  contemporaries 
had  shown  jhe  feminine  power  in  fiction  as 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    105 

well  or  better  than  she.  Charlotte  Bronte, 
understood  along  her  own  instincts,  was  as 
great;  Jane  Austen  was  greater.  The  latter 
comes  into  our  present  consideration  only 
as  that  most  exasperating  thing,  an  ideal 
unachieved.  It  is  like  leaving  an  uncon- 
quered  fortress  in  the  rear.  No  woman  later 
has^captured  the  complete  COTTlTPon  sense  of 
t[ane_Austen.  She  could  keep  her  head,  while 
all  the  after  women  went  about  looking  for 
their  brains.  She  could  describe  a  man  coolly; 
which  neither  George  Eliot  nor  Charlotte 
Bronte  could  do.  She  knew  what  she  knew, 
like  a  sound  dogmatist:  she  did  not  know 
what  she  did  not  know — like  a  sound  agnos- 
tic. But  she  belongs  to  a  vanished  world  be- 
fore the  great  progressive  age  of  which  I  write. 
'Qn?  of  *kg  fkqTtjrtfristics  of  the  central 
Victorian  spirit  was  a  tendency  to  piiKstit.nf.fl 

V\certain  jnnre*  nr  less  satisfied  fteriniisfless  for 
Lthe  extremes  of  tragedy  ami  comedy:    This  is 

marked  by  a  certain  change  in  George  Eliot; 

as  it  is  marked  by  a  certain  limitation  or 


106    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

moderation  in  Dickens.  Dickens  was  the 
People,  as  it  was  in  the  eighteenth  century 
and  still  largely  is,  in  spite  of  all  the  talk 
for  and  against  Board  School  Education: 
comic,  tragic,  realistic,  free-spoken,  far  looser 
in  words  than  in  deeds.  It  marks  the  silent 
strength  and  pressure  of  the  spirit  of  the 
Victorian  middle  class  that  even  to  Dickens 
it  never  occurred  to  revive  the  verbal  coarse- 
ness of  Smollett  or  Swift.  The  other  proof 
of  the  same  pressure  is  the  chjang£.iQ  George 
Eliot.  She  was  noJLa_genius  in  the  elemental 
sense  of  Dickens;  she  could  never  have  been 
either  so  strong  or  so  soft.  But  she  did 
originally  represent  some  of  the  same  popular 
realities:  and  her  first  books  (at  least  as 
compared  with  her  latest)  were  full  of  sound 
fun  and  bitter  pathos.  Mr.  Max  Beerbohm 
has  remarked  (in  his  glorious  essay  called 
Ichabod,  I  think),  that  Silas  Marner  would 
not  have  forgotten  his  miserliness  if  George 
Eliot  had  written  of  him  in  her  maturity.  I 
have  a  great  regard  for  Mr.  Beerbohm's 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    107 

literary  judgments;  and  it  may  be  so.  But 
if  literature  means  anything  more  than  a  cold 
calculation  of  the  chances,  if  there  is  in  it,  as 
I  believe,  any  deeper  idea  of  detaching  the 
spirit  of  life  from  the  dull  obstacles  of  life, 
of  permitting  human  nature  really  to  reveal 
itself  as  human,  if  (to  put  it  shortly)  literature 
has  anything  on  earth  to  do  with  being 
interesting — then  I  think  we  would  rather 
have  a  few  more  Marners  than  that  rich 
maturity  that  gave  us  the  analysed  dust- 
heaps  of  Daniel  Deronda. 

In  her  best  novels  there  is  real  humour, 
of  a  cool  sparkling  sort;  there  is  a  strong 
sense  of  substantial  character  that  has  not 
yei^  degenerated  into  psychology^  (there  ia_a  "* 
great  deal  of  wisdom,  chiefly  a.bnnt  women ; 
infWH  there  is  almost  every  element,  of 

literature,  except,  a  fwtm'n  inrtagrriKoMa  fViing 

callqd  glamour'  which  was  the  whole  stock- 
in-trade  of  the  Brontes,  which  we  feel  in 
Dickens  when  Quilp  clambers  amid  rotten 
wood  by  the  desolate  river;  and  even  in 


108    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

Thackeray  when  Esmond  with  his  melan- 
choly eyes  wanders  like  some  swarthy  crow 
about  the  dismal  avenues  of  Castlewood. 
Of  this  quality  (which  some  have  called,  but 
hastily,  the  essential  of  literature)  George 
Eliot  had  not  little  but  nothing.  Her  air 
is  bright  and  intellectually  even  exciting; 
but  it  is  like  the  air  of  a  cloudless  day  on  the 
parade  at  Brighton.  She  sees  people  clearly. 
.bnt_not  through  an  atmosphere.  And  she 
can  conjure  up  storms  in  the  conscious,  but 
not  in  the  subconscious  mind. 

It  is  true  (though  the  idea  should  not  be 
exaggerated)  that  this  deficiency  was  largely 
due  to  her  being  cut  off  from  all  those  concep- 
tions that  had  made  the  fiction  of  a  Muse;  the 
deep  idea  that  there  are  really  demons  and 
angels  behind  men.  Certainly  t.hf*  inc™*fl.sinfr 
atheism  of  her  school  spoilt  her  own  particular 
imaginative  talent  •  <^f  y?^  *  ar  ^ss  fr**»  when 
JLadislaw—  than  when  she 


thought  like  Casaubon.    It  also  betrayed  her 
on  a  matter  specially  requiring  common  sense; 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    109 

I  mean  sex.  Tfaere  is  nothing  thg*  ?'g  s^  pr^- 
foundly  false  as  rationalist  flirtation.  Each 
sex  is  trying  to  be  both  sexes  at  once;  and 
the  result  is  a  confusion  more  untruthful  than 
any  conventions.  This  can  easily  be  seen 
by  comparing  her  with  a  greater  woman  who 
died  before  the  beginning  of  our  present 
problem.  Jane  Austen  was  born  before  thnsft 
tnlrl)  ^protected  woman 


from  truth,  were  burst  by  the-  Brontes  or 
elaborately  untied  by  George  Eliot.  Yet 
the  fact  remains  that  Jane  A  us.  ten  knfw  much 

Tnnrg_g.hnnt  ™m  t.Vin.n  pit.liftr_QLtliPTn.     Jane 

Austen  may  have  been  protected  from  truth  : 
but  it  was  precious  little  of  truth  that  was 
protected  from  her.  When  Darcy,  in  finally 
confessing  his  faults,  says,  "I  have  been  a 
selfish  being  all  my  life,  in  practice  though  not 
in  theory,"  he  gets  nearer  to  a  complete  con- 
fession of  the  intelligent  male  than  ever  was 
even  hinted  by  the  Byronic  lapses  of  the 
Brontes'  heroes  or  the  elaborate  exculpations 
of  George  Eliot's.  Jane  Austen,  of  course, 


110    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

covered  an  infinitely  smaller  field  than  any 
of  her  later  rivals;  but  I  have  always  believed 
in  the  victory  of  small  nationalities. 

The  Brontes  suggest  themselves  here;  be- 
cause their  superficial  qualities,  the  qualities 
that  can  be  seized  upon  in  satire,  were  in  this 
an  exaggeration  of  what  was,  in  George  Eliot, 
hardly  more  than  an  omission.  There  was 
perhaps  a  time  when  Mr.  Rawjester  was  more 
widely  known  than  Mr.  Rochester.  And 
certainly  Mr.  Rochester  (to  adopt  the  diction 
of  that  other  eminent  country  gentleman, 
Mr.  Darcy)  was  simply  individualistic  not 
only  in  practice,  but  in  theory.  Now  any 
one  may  be  so  in  practice:  but  a  man  who  is 
simply  individualistic  in  theory  must  merely 
be  an  ass.  Undoubtedly  the  Bronte's  ex- 
posed themselves  to  some  misunderstanding 
^y^tbus  perpetually  making  the  masculine 
creature  much  more  masculine  than  he  wants 
to  be.  Thackeray  (a  man  of  strong  though 
sleepy  virility)  asked  in  his  exquisite  plaintive 
way:  "Why  do  our  lady  novelists  make  the 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS      111 

men  bully  the  women?"  It  is,  I  think,  un- 
questionably true  that  fhp  "Rrontffp  trp.at.pfl 
thgjP1^?  at  an  almost  a-narpfnV . thing. coming 
in  from  outsidg-xiat.iire;  rrmrh  as  ppnplp  on 
this  planet,  regard  a  nrnnpt  Even  the  really 
delicate  and  sustained  comedy  of  Paul  Eman- 
uel  is  not  quite  free  from  thisjair  of  studying 
something  alien^)  The  reply  may  be  made 
that  the  women  in  men's  novels  are  equally 
fallacious.  The  reply  is  probably  just. 

What  the  Bronte's  really  brought  into  fic- 
tion  was  exactly  what  Carlyle  brought  into 
history;  /the  blast  of  the  mysticism  of  the 
NorthT)  They  were  of  Irish  blood  settled  on 
the  windy  heights  of  Yorkshire;  inthatcoun> 
try  where  Catholicism  lingered  latest,  but  in 
a  superstitious  form;  where  modern  indus- 
trialism came  earliest  and  was  more  supersti- 
tious still.  The  strong  winds  and  sterile 
places,  the  old  tyranny  of  barons  and  the  new 
and  blacker  tyranny  of  manufacturers,  has 
made  and  left  that  country  a  land  of  barba- 
rians. All  Charlotte  Bronte's  earlier  work  is 


112    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

full  of  that  sullen  and  unmanageable  world; 
moss-troopers  turned  hurriedly  into  miners; 
the  last  of  the  old  world  forced  into  support- 
ing the  very  first  crudities  of  the  new.  In 
this  way  Charlotte  Bronte  represents  the 
Victorian  settlement  in  a  special  way.  The 
Early  Victorian  Industrialism  is  to  George 
Eliot  and  to  Charlotte  Bronte,  rather  as  the 
Late  Victorian  Imperialism  would  have  been 
to  Mrs.  Humphry  Ward  in  the  centre  of  the 
empire  and  to  Miss  Olive  Schreiner  at  the 
edge  of  it.  The  real  strength  there  is  in 
characters  like  Robert  Moore,  when  he  is 
dealing  with  anything  except  women,  is  the 
romance  of  industry  in  its  first  advance:  a 
romance  that  has  not  remained.  On  such 
fighting  frontiers  people  always  exaggerate  t 
the  strong  qualities  the  masculine  sex  does 
possess,  and  always  add  a  great  many  strong 
qualities  that  it  does  not  possess.  That  is, 
briefly,  all  the  reason  in  the  Brontes  on  this 
special  subject:  the  rest  is  stark  unreason.  It 
can  be  most  clearly  seen  in  that  sister  of 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    113 

Charlotte  Bronte's  who  has  achieved  the  real 
feat  of  remaining  as  a  great  woman  rather 
than  a  great  writer.  There  is  really,  in  a  nar- 
row but,  intense  wa.y,  a  tradition  oLEmily 
Rront.p!  a.s  there  is  a  tradition  oLSt.  Peter 
or  Dr.  Johnson.  People  talk  as  if  they  had 
known  her^_apart  from  her  works.  She  must 
have  been  spmethmgjnor^t3ian_an  original 
person;  perhaps  anjorigin.  But  so  far  as  her 
written^  works  go  shejenters  English  letters 
only  as  an  original  person — and  rather  a  nar- 
row__one.  Her  imagination  was  sometimes 
superjuiinan — always  inhuman.  Withering 
Heights  might  have  been  writtea_by_an_£agle. 
SbeJs  the  strongest  instance  of  these  strong 
imaginations  that  made  the  other  sex  a  mon- 
ster: for  Heathcliffe  fails  as  a  m**^  «.« 

tiophically   ^   he   siiffpptf^a   as    n. 

think  Emily  Bronte  was  further  narrowed 
by  the  broadness  of  her  religious  views;  but 
never,  of  course,  so  much  as  George  Eliot. 

IiL  any  case,  it  is  Charlotte  Bronte  who 
enteis_¥icJtQiian  literature.   The  shortest  way 


114    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

of  stating  her  strong  contribution  is,  I  think, 
this:  that  she  reached  the  highest  romance 
through  the  lowest  realism.  She  did  not 
set  out  with  Amadis  of  Gaul  in  a  forest  or 
with  Mr.  Pickwick  in  a  comic  club.  She  set 
out  with  herself,  with  her  own  dingy  clothes, 
and  accidental  ugliness,  and  flat,  coarse, 
provincial  household;  and  forcibly  fused  all 
such  muddy  materials  into  a  spirited  fairy- 
tale. If  the  first  chapters  on  the  home  and 
school  had  not  proved  how  heavy  and  hateful 
sanity  can  be,  there  would  really  be  less  point 
in  the  insanity  of  Mr.  Rochester's  wife — or  the 
not  much  milder  insanity  of  Mrs.  Rochester's 
husband.  She  discovered  the  secret  of  hiding 
the  sensational  in  the  commonplace:  and 
Jane  Eyre  remains  the  best  of  her  books 
(better  even  than  Villette)  because  while  it 
is  a  human  document  written  in  blood,  it 
is  also  one  of  the  best  blood-and-thunder 
detective  stories  in  the  world. 
(^  But  while  Emily  Bronte  was  as  unsociable 
as  a  storm  at  midnight,  and  while  Charlotte 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS   115 

Bronte  was  at  best  like  that  warmer  and  more 
domestic  thing,  a  house  on  fire — they  do 
connect  themselves  with  the  qalm  of  George 
Eliot,  as  the  forf  runners  of  many  later  de- 
velopments  of  the  feminiqe  fl-rlva/nr^.  Many 
forerunners  (if  it  comes  to  that)  would  have 
felt  rather  ill  if  they  had  seen  the  things  they 
foreran.  This  notion  of  a  hazy  anticipation 
of  after  history  has  been  absurdly  overdone: 
as  when  men  connect  Chaucer  with  the 
Reformation;  which  is  like  connecting  Homer 
with  the  Syracusan  Expedition.  Bufr  it  is 
to  some  extent  true  that  all  these  great 
Victorian  women  had  a  sort,  of  unrest,  in 
their  souls.  And  the  proof  of  it  is  that  (after 
what  I  will  claim  to  call  the  healthier  time 
of  Dickens  and  Thackeray)  it  began  to  be 
admitted  by  the  great  Victorian,  men.  If 
there  had  not  been  something  in  that  irrita- 
tion, we  should  hardly  have  had  to  speak 
in  these  pages  of  Diana  of  the  Crossways  or 
of  Tess  of  the  D'Urbervilles.  To  what  this 
strange  and  very  local  sex  war  has  been  due 


116    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

I  shall  not  ask,  because  I  have  no  answer. 
That  it  was  due  to  votes  or  even  little  legal 
inequalities  about  marriage,  I  feel  myself 
here  too  close  to  realities  even  to  discuss.  My 
own  guess  is  that  it  has  been  due  to  the  great 
neglect  of  the  military  spirit  by  the  male 
Victorians.  The  woman  felt  obscurely  that 
she  was  still  running  her  mortal  risk,  while  the 
man  was  not  still  running  his.  But  I  know 
nothing  about  it;  nor  does  anybody  else. 

In  so  short  a  book  on  so  vast,  complex  and 
living  a  subject,  it  is  impossible  to  drop  even 
into  the  second  rank  of  good  authors,  whose 
name  is  legion;  but  it  is  impossible  to  leave 
that  considerable  female  force  in  fiction  which 
has  so  largely  made  the  very  nature  of  the 
modern  novel,  without  mentioning  two  names 
which  almost  brought  that  second  rank  up 
to  the  first  rank.  They  were  at  utterly  op- 
posite poles.  The  one  succeeded  by  being 
a  much  mellower  and  more  Christian  George 
Eliot;  the  other  succeeded  by  being  a  much 
more  mad  and  unchristian  Emily  Bronte. 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS     117 

But  Mrs.  Oliphant  and  the  author  calling 
herself  "Ouida"  both  forced  themselves  well 
within  the  frontier  of  fine  literature.  The 
Beleaguered  City  is  literature  in  its  highest 
sense;  the  other  works  of  its  author  tend  to 
fall  into  fiction  in  its  best  working  sense. 
Mrs.  Oliphant  was  infinitely  saner  in  that 
city  of  ghosts  than  the  cosmopolitan  Ouida 
ever  was  in  any  of  the  cities  of  men.  Mrs. 
Oliphant  would  never  have  dared  to  discover, 
either  in  heaven  or  hell,  such  a  thing  as  a 
hairbrush  with  its  back  encrusted  with 
diamonds.  But  though  Ouida  was  violent 
and  weak  where  Mrs.  Oliphant  might  have 
been  mild  and  strong,  her  own  triumphs 
were  her  own.  She  had  a  real  power  of  ex- 
pressing the  senses  through  her  style;  of 
conveying  the  very  heat  of  blue  skies  or 
the  bursting  of  palpable  pomegranates.  And 
just  as  Mrs.  Oliphant  transfused  her  more 
timid  Victorian  tales  with  a  true  and  intense 
faith  in  the  Christian  mystery — so  Ouida, 
with  infinite  fury  and  infinite  confusion  of 


118    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

thought,  did  fill  her  books  with  Byron 
and  the  remains  of  the  French  Revolution. 
In  the  track  of  such  genius  there  has  been 
quite  an  accumulation  of  true  talent  as 
in  the  children's  tales  of  Mrs.  Ewing,  the 
historical  tales  of  Miss  Yonge,  the  tales  of 
Mrs.  Molesworth,  and  so  on.  On  a  general 
review  I  do  not  think  I  have  been  wrong  in 
taking  the  female  novelists  first.  -I  think 
they  gave  its  special  shape,  its  temporary 
t.wist..,  t.Q  the  Victorian  novel . 

Nevertheless  it  is  a  shock  (I  almost  dare  to 
call  it  a  relief)  to  come  back  to  the  males. 
It  is  the  more  abrupt  because  the  first  name 
that  must  be  mentioned  derives  directly 
from  the  mere  maleness  of  the  Sterne  and 
Smollett  novel.  I  have  already  spoken  of 
Tjujkgns  ns  t,he  most  homely  and  instinntivf>T 
and  therefore  probably  the  heaviest,  of  all 
the  onslaughts  made  on  the  central  Victorian 
saliafactipn.  There  is  therefore  the  less  to 
say  of  him  here,  where  we  consider  him  only 
as  a  novelist;  but  there  is  still  much  more 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS   119 

to  say  than  can  even  conceivably  be  said. 
Dickens,  as  we  have  stated,  inherited  the  old 
comic,  rambling  novel  from  Smollett  and 
the  rest.  Dickens,  as  we  have  also  stated, 
consented  to  expurgate  that  novel.  But 
when  all  origins  and  all  restraints  have  been 
defined  and  allowed  for,  the  creature  that 
came  out  was  such  as  we  shall  not  see  again. 
Smollett  was  coarse;  but  Smollett  was  also 
cruel.  Dickens  was  frequently  horrible;  he 
was  never  cruel.  The  art  of  Dickens  was^the 
most_jexquisite  of  arts:  it  was  the  art  of 
enjoying  everybody.  Dickens,  being  a  very 
human  writer,  had  to  be  a  very  human  being; 
he  had  his  faults  and  sensibilities  hi  a  strong 
degree;  and  I  do  not  for  a  moment  maintain 
that  he  enjoyed  everybody  in  his  daily  life. 
But  he  enjoyed  everybody  in  his  books:  and 
everybody  has  enjoyed  everybody  in  those 
books  even  till  to-day.  His  books  are  full 
of  baffled  villains  stalking  out  or  cowardly 
bullies  kicked  downstairs.  But  the  villains 
and  the  cowards  are  such  delightful  people 


120    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

that  the  reader  always  hopes  the  villain  will 
put  his  head  through  a  side  window  and  make 
a  last  remark;  or  that  the  bully  will  say  one 
thing  more,  even  from  the  bottom  of  the 
stairs.  The  reader  really  hopes  this;  and  he 
cannot  get  rid  of  the  fancy  that  the  author 
hopes  so  too.  I  cannot  at  the  moment  recall 
that  Dickens  ever  killed  a  comic  villain, 
except  Quilp,  who  was  deliberately  made  even 
more  villainous  than  comic.  There  can  be 
no  serious  fears  for  the  life  of  Mr.  Wegg  in 
the  muckcart;  though  Mr.  Pecksniff  fell  to 
be  a  borrower  of  money,  and  Mr.  Mantalini 
to  turning  a  mangle,  the  human  race  has  the 
comfort  of  thinking  they  are  still  alive:  and 
one  might  have  the  rapture  of  receiving  a 
begging  letter  from  Mr.  Pecksniff,  or  even  of 
catching  Mr.  Mantalini  collecting  the  wash- 
ing, if  one  always  lurked  about  on  Monday 
mornings.  This  sentiment  (the  true  artist  will 
be  relieved  to  hear)  is  entirely  unmoral. 
Mrs.  Wilfer  deserved  death  much  more  than 
Mr.  Quilp,  for  she  had  succeeded  in  poisoning 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS   121 

family  life  persistently,  while  he  was  (to  say 
the  least  of  it)  intermittent  in  his  domesticity. 
But  who  can  honestly  say  he  does  not  hope 
Mrs.  Wilfer  is  still  talking  like  Mrs.  Wilfer — 
especially  if  it  is  only  hi  a  book?  This  is  the 
artistic  greatness  of  Dickens,  before  and  after 
which  there  is  really  nothing  to  be  said.  He 
had  flip  power  of  creating  people,  both  pos- 
sible and  impossible,  who  were  simply  pre- 
cious RTiH  priceless  people^  and  anything 
subtler  added  to  that  truth  really  only 
weakens  it. 

The  mention  of  Mrs.  Wilfer  (whom  the 
heart  is  loth  to  leave)  reminds  one  of  the  only 
elementary  ethical  truth  that  is  essential  in 
the  study  of  Dickens.  That  is  that  he-had 
frroad  or  universal  sympathies  in  a  sense 
totally  unknown  to  the  social  reformers  who 
wallow  in  such  phrases.  Dickens  (unlike  the 
social  reformers)  really  did  sympathise  with 
every  sort  of  victim  of  every  sort  of  tyrant. 
He  did  truly  pray  for  all  who  are  desolate 
and  oppressed.  If  you  try  to  tie  him  to  any 


122    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

cause  narrower  than  that  Prayer  Book  defini- 
tion, you  will  find  you  have  shut  out  half  his 
best  work.  If,  in  your  sympathy  for  Mrs. 
Quilp,  you  call  Dickens  the  champion  of 
downtrodden  woman,  you  will  suddenly 
remember  Mr.  Wilfer,  and  find  yourself  un- 
able to  deny  the  existence  of  downtrodden 
man.  If  in  your  sympathy  for  Mr.  Rounce- 
well  you  call  Dickens  the  champion  of  a 
manly  middle-class  Liberalism  against  Ches- 
ney  Wold,  you  will  suddenly  remember 
Stephen  Blackpool — and  find  yourself  unable 
to  deny  that  Mr.  Rouncewell  might  be  a 
pretty  insupportable  cock  on  his  own  dung- 
hill. If  in  your  sympathy  for  Stephen  Black- 
pool you  call  Dickens  a  Socialist  (as  does  Mr. 
Pugh),  and  think  of  him  as  merely  heralding 
the  great  Collectivist  revolt  against  Victorian 
Individualism  and  Capitalism,  which  seemed 
so  clearly  to  be  the  crisis  at  the  end  of  this 
epoch — you  will  suddenly  remember  the 
agreeable  young  Barnacle  at  the  Circum- 
locution Office:  and  you  will  be  unable,  for 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    123 

very  shame,  to  assert  that  Dickens  would 
have  trusted  the  poor  to  a  State  Department. 
Dickens  did  not  merely  believe  in  the  brother- 
hood nf  men  in  the  weak  modern  way;  Jie 

was  the  hrpfWIinorl  r>f  mgnT  and 


a  brotherhood  in  sin  as  wpll  a.s  in  aspiration. 
And  he  was  not  only  larger  than  the  old  fac- 
tions he  satirised;  he  was  larger  than  any  of 
our  great  social  schools  that  have  gone  for- 
ward since  he  died. 

The  seemingly.rjuaint  custom  of  mm  paring 
Dicken5jajjd-Thackeray_existed  Jn..their  own 
time^and  no  one  will,  dismiss  it  with  entire 
disdain  who  remembers  that  the  Victorian 
tradition  was  domestic  and  genuine,  even 
when,it  was  hoodwinked  and  unworldly. 
There  must  have  been  some  reason  for  mak- 
ing this  imaginary  duel  between  two  quite 
separate  and  quite  amiable  acquaintances. 
And  there  is,  after  all,  some  reason  for  it.  It 
is  not,  as  was  once  cheaply  said,  that  Thack- 
eray went  in  for  truth,  and  Dickens  for  mere 
caricature.  There  is  a  huge  accumulation  of 


124    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

truth,  down  to  the  smallest  detail,  in  Dickens: 
he  seems  sometimes  a  mere  mountain  of  facts. 
Thackeray,  in  comparison,  often  seems  quite 
careless  and  elusive;  almost  as  if  he  did  not 
quite  know  where  all  his  characters  were. 
There  is  a  truth  behind  the  popular  distinc-    i 
tion;   but  it  lies  much  deeper.    Perhaps  the    I 
best  way  of  stating  it  is  this:   thaJJIHckens   I 
used  reality,   while  aiming  at.  an   gfiW>t  of  I 
romance;  while  Thackeray  used  the  loose  Ian-  I 
guage  and  ordinary  approaches  of  romance.  J 
while  aiming  at  an  effect  of^reajjty.    It  was 
the  special  and  splendid  business  of  Dickens 
to  introduce  us  to  people  who  would  have 
been  quite  incredible  if  he  had  not  told  us  so 
much  truth  about  them.    It  was  the  special  / 
and  not  less  splendid  task  of  Thackeray  to 
introduce  us  to  people  whom  we  knew  al- 
ready.   Paradoxically,  but  very  practically, 
it  followed  that  his  introductions  were  the 
longer  of  the  two.    When  we  hear  of  Aunt 
Betsy  Trotwood,  we  vividly  envisage  every- 
thing about  her,  from  her  gardening  gloves  to 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    125 

her  seaside  residence,  from  her  hard,  hand- 
some face  to  her  tame  lunatic  laughing  at  the 
bedroom  window.  It  is  all  so  minutely  true 
that  she  must  be  true  also.  We  only  feel  in- 
clined to  walk  round  the  English  coast  until 
we  find  that  particular  garden  and  that  partic- 
ular aunt.  But  when  we  turn  from  the  aunt  of 
Copperfield  to  the  uncle  of  Pendennis,  we  are 
more  likely  to  run  round  the  coast  trying  to 
find  a  watering-place  where  he  isn't  than  one 
where  he  is.  The  moment  one  sees  Major 
Pendennis,  one  sees  a  hundred  Major  Pen- 
dennises.  It  is  not  a  matter  of  mere  realism. 
Miss  Trotwood's  bonnet  and  gardening  tools 
and  cupboard  full  of  old-fashioned  bottles 
are  quite  as  true  in  the  materialistic  way  as 
the  Major's  cuffs  and  corner  table  and  toast 
and  newspaper.  Both  writers  are  realistic: 
but  Dickens  writes  realism  in  nrrjer  to  make 
thfijncredible  credible.  Thackeray  writes  it 
™  I?£dPLtft-TMfrft  lia  rerognifip  an  old  friend. 
Whether  we  shall  be  pleased  to  meet  the  old 
friend  is  quite  another  matter:  I  think  we 


126    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

should  be  better  pleased  to  meet  Miss  Trot- 
wood,  and  find,  as  David  Copperfield  did, 
a  new  friend,  a  new  world.  But  we  recognise 
Major  Pendennis  even  when  we  avoid  him. 
Henceforth  Thackeray  can  count  on  our 
seeing  him  from  his  wig  to  his  well-blacked 
boots  whenever  he  chooses  to  say  "Major 
Pendennis  paid  a  call."  Dickens,  on  the 
other  hand,  had  to  keep  up  an  incessant 
excitement  about  his  characters;  and  no  man 
on  earth  but  he  could  have  kept  it  up. 

It  may  be  said,  in  approximate  summary, 
that  Thackeray  is  the  noyeiiat-of  memory — of 
our  memories  as  well  a.s  his  own.  Dickens 
sepma  fr>  erppft  n^  ^1>g  fhfl.ra.nt.ftrs,  like  amus- 
ing strangers  arriving  aj  lunnh ;  aa.  if.  they^ 

gave  him  not  only  pleasure,  but  surprise.  But 
Thackeray  is  everybody's  past — is  every- 
body's youth.  Forgotten  friends  flit  about 
the  passages  of  dreamy  colleges  and  unremem- 
bered  clubs;  we  hear  fragments  of  unfinished 
conversations,  we  see  faces  without  names 
for  an  instant,  fixed  for  ever  in  some  trivial 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    127 

grimace:  we  smell  the  strong  smell  of  social 
cliques  now  quite  incongruous  to  us;    and 
there  stir  in  all  the  little  rooms  at  once  the 
hundred  ghosts  of  oneself. 
For  this  purpose  X 


a  singularly  ftasy  q,nd  sympathetic  style. 
carved  in  slow  soft  curves  where  Dickens 
hacked  out  his  images  with  a  hatchet.  There 
was  a  sort  of  avuncular  indulgence  about 
his  attitude;  what  he  called  his  "preaching" 
was  at  worst  a  sort  of  grumbling,  ending  with 
the  sentiment  that  boys  will  be  boys  and  that 
there's  nothing  new  under  the  sun.  He  was 
not  really  either  a  cynic  or  a  censor  morum; 
but  (in  another  sense  than  Chaucer's)  a 
g?n,t-lfi  rar^OT1Ar>  Caving  gfwi  \\\f*  weaknesses 
b*»  i-q  sometimes  almost  weak  jabout-them  . 
He  really  comes  nearer  to  exculpating  Pen- 
dennis  or  Ethel  Newcome  than  any  other 
author,  who  saw  what  he  saw,  would  have 
been.  The  rare  wrath  of  such  men  is  all  the 
more  effective;  and  there  are  passages  in 
Vanity  Fair  and  still  more  in  The  Book  of 


128    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE  , 

Snobs,  where  he  does  make  the  dance  of 
wealth  and  fashion  look  stiff  and  monstrous, 
like  a  Babylonian  masquerade.  But  he  never 
quite  did  it  in  such  a  way  as  to  turn  the 
course  of  the  Victorian  Age. 

It  may  seem  strange  to  say  that  Thackeray 
did  not  know  enough  of  the  world;  yet  this 
was  the  truth  about  him  in  large  matters  of 
the  philosophy  of  life,  and  especially  of  his 
own  time.  He  did  not  know  the  way  things 
were  going:  he  was  too  Victorian  to  under- 
stand the  Victorian  epoch.  He  did  not  know 
enough  ignorant  people  to  have  heard  the 
news.  In  one  of  his  delightful  asides  he 
imagines  two  little  clerks  commenting  erro- 
neously on  the  appearance  of  Lady  Kew  or 
Sir  Brian  Newcome  in  the  Park,  and  says: 
"How  should  Jones  and  Brown,  who  are  not, 
vous  comprenez,  du  monde,  understand  these 
mysteries?"  But  I  think  Thackeray  knew 
quite  as  little  about  Jones  and  Brown  as  they 
knew  about  Newcome  and  Kew;  his  world 
was  le  monde.  Hence  he  seemed  to  take  it  for 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    129 

granted  that  the  Victorian  compromise  would 
last;  while  Dickens  (who  knew  his  Jones  and 
Brown)  had  already  guessed  that  it  would  not. 
Thackeray  did  not  realise  that  the  Victorian 
platform  was  a  moving  platform.  To  take 
but  one  instance,  he  was  a  Radical  like 
Dickens;  all  really  representative  Victorians, 
except  perhaps  Tennyson,  were  Radicals. 
But  he  seems  to  have  thought  of  all  reform 
as  simple  and  straightforward  and  all  of  a 
piece;  as  if  Catholic  Emancipation,  the  New 
Poor  Law,  Free  Trade  and  the  Factory  Acts 
and  Popular  Education  were  all  parts  of  one 
almost  self-evident  evolution  of  enlighten- 
ment. Dickens,  being  in  touch  with  the 
democracy,  had  already  discovered  that  the 
country  had  come  to  a  dark  place  of  divided 
ways  and  divided  counsels.  In  Hard  Times 
he  realised  Democracy  at  war  with  Radical- 
ism; and  became,  with  so  incompatible  an 
ally  as  Ruskin,  not  indeed  a  Socialist,  but 
certainly  an  anti-Individualist.  In  Our 
Mutual  Friend  he  felt  the  strength  of  the  new 


130    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

rich,  and  knew  they  had  begun  to  transform 
the  aristocracy,  instead  of  the  aristocracy 
transforming  them.  He  knew  that  Veneering 
had  carried  off  Twemlow  in  triumph.  He 
very  nearly  knew  what  we  all  know  to-day: 
that,  so  far  from  it  being  possible  to  plod 
along  the  progressive  road  with  more  votes 
and  more  Free  Trade,  England  must  either 
sharply  become  very  much  more  democratic 
or  as  rapidly  become  very  much  less  so. 

There  gathers  round  these  two  great 
novelists  a  considerable  group  of  good  novel- 
ists, who  more  or  less  mirror  their  mid- 
Victorian  mood.  Wilkie  Collins  may  be  said 
to  be  in  this  way  a  lesser  Dickens  and  An- 
thony Trollope  a  lesser  Thackeray.  Wilkie 
Collins  is  chiefly  typical  of  his  time  in  this 
respect:  that  while  his  moral  and  religious 
conceptions  were  as  mechanical  as  his  care- 
fully constructed  fictitious  conspiracies,  he 
nevertheless  informed  the  latter  with  a  sort  of 
involuntary  mysticism  which  dealt  wholly 
with  the  darker  side  of  the  soul.  For  this 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS   131 

was  one  of  the  most  peculiar  of  the  problems 
of  the  Victorian  mind.  Jhe  idea  of  the  super- 
natural was  perhaps  at  as  low  an  ebb^as_it .. 
had  ever  been — certainly  much  lower  than  it 
is  now.  But  in  spite  of  this,  and  in  spite  of  a 
certain  ethical  cheeriness  that  was  almost 
de  rigueur — the  strange  fact  remains  that  the 
only  sort  of  supernaturalism  the  Victorians 
tn  thfrir  ima.ginfl.tinns  wa.s  a.  sad  snper- 

sm.  They  might  have  ghost  stories, 
but  not  saints'  stories.  They  could  trifle  with 
the  curse  or  unpardoning  prophecy  of  a  witch, 
but  not  with  the  pardon  of  a  priest.  They 
seem  to  have  held  (I  believe  erroneously)  that 
the  supernatural  was  safest  when  it  came  from 
below.  When  we  think  (for  example)  of  the 
uncountable  riches  of  religious  art,  imagery, 
ritual  and  popular  legend  that  has  clustered 
round  Christmas  through  all  the  Christian 
ages,  it  is  a  truly  extraordinary  thing  to 
reflect  that  Dickens  (wishing  to  have  in  The 
Christmas  Carol  a  little  happy  supernatural- 
ism  by  way  of  a  change)  actually  had  to  make 


132    VICTORIAN   AGE  IN   LITERATURE 

up  a  mythology  for  himself.  Here  was  one  of 
the  rare  cases  where  Dickens,  in  a  real  and 
human  sense,  did  suffer  from  the  lack  of  cul- 
ture. For  the  rest,  Wilkie  Collins  is  these  two 
elements:  the  mechanical  and  the  mystical; 
both  very  good  of  their  kind.  He  is  one  of 
the  few  novelists  in  whose  case  it  is  proper 
and  literal  to  speak  of  his  "plots."  He  was 
a  plotter;  he  went  about  to  slay  Godfrey 
Ablewhite  as  coldly  and  craftily  as  the 
Indians  did.  But  he  also  had  a  sound  though 
sinister  note  of  true  magic;  as  in  the  repeti- 
tion of  the  two  white  dresses  in  The  Woman 
in  White;  or  of  the  dreams  with  their  double 
explanations  in  Armadale.  His  ghosts  do 
walk.  They  are  alive;  and  walk  as  softly  as 
Count  Fosco,  but  as  solidly.  Finally,  The 
Moonstone  is  probably  the  best  detective  tale 
in  the  world. 

Anthony  Trollope,  a  clear  and  very  capable 
realist,  represents  rather  another  side  of  the 
Victorian  spirit  of  comfort;  its  leisureliness, 
its  love  of  detail,  especially  of  domestic 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS     133 

detail;  its  love  of  following  characters  and 
kindred  from  book  to  book  and  from  genera- 
tion to  generation.  Dickens  very  seldom 
tried  this  latter  experiment,  and  then  (as  in 
Master  Humphrey's  Clock)  unsuccessfully; 
those  magnesium  blazes  of  his  were  too 
brilliant  and  glaring  to  be  indefinitely  pro- 
longed. But  Thackeray  was  full  of  it;  and 
we  often  feel  that  the  characters  in  The  New- 
comes  or  Philip  might  legitimately  complain 
that  their  talk  and  tale  are  being  perpetually 
interrupted  and  pestered  by  people  out  of 
other  books.  Within  his  narrower  limits, 
Trollope  was  a  more  strict  and  masterly 
realist  than  Thackeray,  and  even  those  who 
would  call  his  personages  "types**  would 
admit  that  they  are  as  vivid  as  characters. 
It  was  a  bustling  but  a  quiet  world  that  he 
described:  politics  before  the  coming  of  the 
Irish  and  the  Socialists;  the  Church  in  the 
lull  between  the  Oxford  Movement  and 
the  modem  High  Anglican  energy.  And  it 
is  notable  in  the  Victorian  spirit  once  more 


134    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

that  though  his  clergymen  are  all  of  them  real 
men  and  many  of  them  good  men,  it  never 
really  occurs  to  us  to  think  of  them  as  the 
priests  of  a  religion. 

Charles  Reade  may  be  said  to  go  along  with 
these;  and  Disraeli  and  even  Kingsley;  not 
because  these  three  very  different  persons 
had  anything  particular  in  common,  but 
because  they  all  fell  short  of  the  first  rank  in 
about  the  same  degree.  Charles  Reade  had 
a  kind  of  cold  coarseness  about  him,  not 
morally  but  artistically,  which  keeps  him  out 
of  the  best  literature  as  such:  but  he  is  of 
importance  to  the  Victorian  development  in 
another  way;  because  he  has  the  harsher  and 
more  tragic  note  that  has  come  later  in  the 
study  of  our  social  problems.  He  is  the  first 
of  the  angry  realists.  Kingsley's  best  books 
may  be  called  boys'  books.  There  is  a  real 
though  a  juvenile  poetry  in  Westward  Ho! 
and  though  that  narrative,  historically  con- 
sidered, is  very  much  of  a  lie,  it  is  a  good, 
thundering  honest  lie.  There  are  also 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    135 

genuinely  eloquent  things  in  Hypatia,  and 
a  certain  electric  atmosphere  of  sectarian 
excitement  that  Kingsley  kept  himself  in, 
and  did  know  how  to  convey.  He  said  he 
wrote  the  book  in  his  heart's  blood.  This  is 
an  exaggeration,  but  there  is  a  truth  in  it; 
and  one  does  feel  that  he  may  have  relieved 
his  feelings  by  writing  it  in  red  ink.  As  for 
Disraeli,  his  novels  are  able  and  interesting 
considered  as  everything  except  novels,  and 
are  an  important  contribution  precisely  be- 
cause they  are  written  by  an  alien  who  did 
not  take  our  politics  so  seriously  as  Trollope 
did.  They  are  important  again  as  showing 
those  later  Victorian  changes  which  men  like 
Thackeray  missed.  Disraeli  did  do  something 
towards  revealing  the  dishonesty  of  our 
politics — even  if  he  had  done  a  good  deal 
towards  bringing  it  about. 

Between  this  group  and  the  next  there 
hovers  a  figure  very  hard  to  place;  not  higher 
in  letters  than  these,  yet  not  easy  to  class 
with  them;  I  mean  Bulwer  Lytton.  He  was 


136    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

no  greater  than  they  were;  yet  somehow  he 
seems  to  take  up  more  space.  He  did  not, 
in  the  ultimate  reckoning,  do  anything  in 
particular:  but  he  was  a  figure;  rather  as 
Oscar  Wilde  was  later  a  figure.  You  could 
not  have  the  Victorian  Age  without  him. 
And  this  was  not  due  to  wholly  superficial 
things  like  his  dandyism,  his  dark,  sinister 
good  looks  and  a  great  deal  of  the  mere 
polished  melodrama  that  he  wrote.  There 
was  something  in  his  all-round  interests;  in 
the  variety  of  things  he  tried;  in  his  half- 
aristocratic  swagger  as  poet  and  politician, 
that  made  him  in  some  ways  a  real  touch- 
stone of  the  time.  It  is  noticeable  about  him 
that  he  is  always  turning  up  everywhere  and 
that  he  brings  other  people  out,  generally 
in  a  hostile  spirit.  His  Byronic  and  almost 
Oriental  ostentation  was  used  by  the  young 
Thackeray  as  something  on  which  to  sharpen 
his  new  razor  of  Victorian  common  sense. 
His  pose  as  a  dilettante  satirist  inflamed  the 
execrable  temper  of  Tennyson,  and  led  to 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    137 

those  lively  comparisons  to  a  bandbox  and 
a  lion  in  curlpapers.  He  interposed  the  glove 
of  warning  and  the  tear  of  sensibility  between 
us  and  the  proper  ending  of  Great  Expectations. 
Of  his  own  books,  by  far  the  best  are  the 
really  charming  comedies  about  TheCaxtons 
and  Kenelm  Chillingly;  none  of  his  other 
works  have  a  high  literary  importance  now, 
with  the  possible  exception  of  A  Strange 
Story ;  but  his  Coming  Race  is  historically 
interesting  as  foreshadowing  those  novels  of 
the  future  which  were  afterwards  such  a 
weapon  of  the  Socialists.  Lastly,  there  was 
an  element  indefinable  about  Lytton,  which 
often  is  in  adventurers;  which  amounts  to  a 
suspicion  that  there  was  something  in  him 
after  all.  It  rang  out  of  him  when  he  said  to 
the  hesitating  Crimean  Parliament:  "De- 
stroy your  Government  and  save  your  army." 
With  the  next  phase  of  Victorian  fiction 
we  enter  a  new  world;  the  later,  more  revolu- 
tionary, more  continental,  freer  but  in  some 
ways  weaker  world  in  which  we  live  to-day. 


138    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

The  subtle  and  sad  change  that  was  passing 
like  twilight  across  the  English  brain  at  this 
time  is  very  well  expressed  in  the  fact  that 
men  have  come  to  mention  the  great  name  of 
Meredith  in  the  same  breath  as  Mr.  Thomas 
Hardy.  Both  writers,  doubtless,  disagreed 
with  the  orthodox  religion  of  the  ordinary 
English  village.  Most  of  us  have  disagreed 
with  that  religion  until  we  made  the  simple 
discovery  that  it  does  not  exist.  But  in  any 
age  where  ideas  could  be  even  feebly  dis- 
entangled from  each  other,  it  would  have  been 
evident  at  once  that  Meredith  and  Hardy 
were,  intellectually  speaking,  mortal  enemies. 
They  were  much  more  opposed  to  each  other 
than  Newman  was  to  Kingsley;  or  than 
Abelard  was  to  St.  Bernard.  But  then  they 
collided  in  a  sceptical  age,  which  is  like 
colliding  in  a  London  fog.  There  can  never 
be  any  clear  controversy  in  a  sceptical  age. 

Nevertheless  both  Hardy  and  Meredith 
did  mean  something;  and  they  did  mean 
diametrically  opposite  things.  Meredith  was 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    139 

perhaps  the  only  man  in  the  modern  world 
who  has  almost  had  the  high  honour  of  rising 
out  of  the  low  estate  of  a  Pantheist  into  the 
high  estate  of  a  Pagan.  A  Pagan  is  a  person 
who  can  do  what  hardly  any  person  for  the 
last  two  thousand  years  could  do:  a  person 
who  can  take  Nature  naturally.  It  is  due 
to  Meredith  to  say  that  no  one  outside  a  few 
of  the  great  Greeks  has  ever  taken  Nature 
so  naturally  as  he  did.  And  it  is  also  due 
to  huii  to  say  that  no  one  outside  Colney 
Hatch  ever  took  Nature  so  unnaturally  as 
it  was  taken  in  what  Mr.  Hardy  has  had  the 
blasphemy  to  call  Wessex  Tales.  This  divi- 
sion between  the  two  points  of  view  is  vital; 
because  the  f-nrn.  of  the  nineteenth  century 
wasj.  very  sharp  one;  by  it  we  have  reached 
the  rapids  in  which  we  find  ourselves  to-day. 
Meredith  really  is  a  Pantheist.  You  can 
express  it  by  saying  that  God  is  the  great 
All:  you  can  express  it  much  more  intelli- 
gently by  saying  that  Pan  is  the  great  god. 
But  there  is  some  sense  in  it,  and  the  sense  is 


140    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE  \ 

this :  that  some  people  believe  that  this  world 
is  sufficiently  good  at  bottom  for  us  to 
trust  ourselves  to  it  without  very  much 
knowing  why.  It  is  the  whole  point  in  most 
of  Meredith's  tales  that  there  is  something 
behind  us  that  often  saves  us  when  we  under- 
stand neither  it  nor  ourselves.  He  sometimes 
talked  mere  intellectualism  about  women: 
but  that  is  because  the  most  brilliant  brains 
can  get  tired.  Meredith's  brain  was  quite 
tired  when  it  wrote  some  of  its  most  quoted 
and  least  interesting  epigrams:  like  that 
about  passing  Seraglio  Point,  but  not  doub- 
ling Cape  Turk.  Those  who  can  see  Mere- 
dith's mind  in  that  are  with  those  who  can 
see  Dickens'  mind  in  Little  Nell.  Both  were 
chivalrous  pronouncements  on  behalf  of  op- 
pressed females:  neither  has  any  earthly 
meaning  as  ideas. 

But  what  Meredith  did  do  for  women  was 
not  to  emancipate  them  (which  means 
nothing)  but  to  express  them,  which  means 
a  great  deal.  And  he  often  expressed  them 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    141 

right,  even  when  he  expressed  himself  wrong. 
Take,  for  instance,  that  phrase  so  often 
quoted:  "Woman  will  be  the  last  thing 
civilised  by  man."  Intellectually  it  is  some- 
thing worse  than  false;  it  is  the  opposite 
of  what  he  was  always  attempting  to  say. 
So  far  from  admitting  any  equality  in  the 
sexes,  it  logically  admits  that  a  man  may  use 
against  a  woman  any  chains  or  whips  he  has 
been  in  the  habit  of  using  against  a  tiger  or 
a  bear.  He  stood  as  the  special  champion  of 
female  dignity:  but  I  cannot  remember  any 
author,  Eastern  or  Western,  who  has  so 
calmly  assumed  that  man  is  the  master  and 
woman  merely  the  material,  as  Meredith 
really  does  in  this  phrase.  Any  one  who  knows 
a  free  woman  (she  is  generally  a  married 
woman)  will  immediately  be  inclined  to  ask 
two  simple  and  catastrophic  questions,  first: 
"Why  should  woman  be  civilised?"  and, 
second:  "Why,  if  she  is  to  be  civilised,  should 
she  be  civilised  by  man?"  In  the  mere  intel- 
lectualism  of  the  matter,  Meredith  seems  to  be 


142    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

talking  the  most  brutal  sex  mastery:  he,  at 
any  rate,  has  not  doubled  Cape  Turk,  nor 
even  passed  Seraglio  Point.  Now  why  is  it 
that  we  all  really  feel  that  this  Meredithian 
passage  is  not  so  insolently  masculine  as  in 
mere  logic  it  would  seem?  I  think  it  is  for 
this  simple  reason:  that  there  is  something 
about  Meredith  making  us  feel  that  it  is  not 
woman  he  disbelieves  in,  but  civilisation.  It 
is  a  dark  undemonstrated  feeling  that  Mere- 
dith would  really  be  rather  sorry  if  woman 
were  civilised  by  man — or  by  anything  else. 
When  we  have  got  that,  we  have  got  the  real 
Pagan — the  man  that  does  believe  in  Pan. 

It  is  proper  to  put  this  philosophic  matter 
first,  before  the  aesthetic  appreciation  of 
Meredith,  because  with  Meredith  a  sort  of 
passing  bell  has  rung  and  the  Victorian  or- 
thodoxy is  certainly  no  longer  safe.  Dickens 
and  Carlyle,  as  we  have  said,  rebelled  against 
the  orthodox  compromise:  but  Meredith 
has  escaped  from  it.  Cosmopolitanism, 
Socialism,  Feminism  are  already  in  the  air; 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    143 

and  Queen  Victoria  has  begun  to  look  like 
Mrs.  Grundy.  But  to  escape  from  a  city  is 
one  thing:  to  choose  a  road  is  another.  The 
free-thinker  who  found  himself  outside  the 
Victorian  city,  found  himself  also  in  the 
fork  of  two  very  different  naturalistic  paths. 
One  of  them  went  upwards  through  a  tangled 
but  living  forest  to  lonely  but  healthy  hills: 
the  other  went  down  to  a  swamp.  Hardy 
went  down  to  botanise  in  the  swamp,  while 
Meredith  climbed  towards  the  sun.  Meredith 
became,  at  his  best,  a  sort  of  daintily  dressed 
Walt  Whitman:  Hardy  bfTP^fi  a  snrf  nf 
village,  fl.t.Tipist.  brooding  and  blaspheming 
overjthe.  village  idiot.  It  is  largely  because 
the  free-thinkers,  as  a  school,  have  hardly 
made  up  their  minds  whether  they  want  to 
be  more  optimist  or  more  pessimist  than 
Christianity  that  their  small  but  sincere 
movement  has  failed. 

For  the  duel  is  deadly;  and  any  agnostic 
who  wishes  to  be  anything  more  than  a 
Nihilist  must  sympathise  with  one  version  of 


144    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

nature  or  the  other.  The  God  of  Meredith 
is  impersonal;  but  he  is  often  more  healthy 
and  kindly  than  any  of  the  persons.  That  of 
Thomas  Hardy  is  almost  made  personal  by 
the  intep^pi  filing  that  he  isjQoisonous.  Na- 
ture is  always  coming  in  to  save  Meredith's 
women;  Mature  is  always  coming  in  to  betray 
and  ruin  Hardy's.  It  has  been  said  that  if 
God  had  not  existed  it  would  have  been 
necessary  to  invent  Him.  But  it  is  not  often, 
as  in  Mr.  Hardy's  case,  that  it  is  necessary  to 
invent  Him  in  order  to  prove  how  unnecessary 
(and  undesirable)  He  is.  But  MixJHardy  is 
anthropomorphic  out  of  sheer  atheism.  He 
personifies  the  universe  in  order  to  give  it  a 
piece  of  his  mind.  But  the  fight  is  unequal 
for  the  old  philosophical  reason:  that  the 
universe  had  already  given  Mr.  Hardy  a  piece 
of  its  mind  to  fight  with.  One  curious  result 
of  this  divergence  in  the  two  types  of  sceptic 
is  this:  that  when  these  two  brilliant  novel- 
ists break  down  or  blow  up  or  otherwise  lose 
for  a  moment  their  artistic  self-command,  they 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    145 

are  both  equally  wild,  but  wild  in  opposite 
directions.  Meredith  shows  an  extravagance 
in  comedy  which,  if  it  were  not  so  compli- 
cated, every  one  would  call  broad  farce.  But 
JS/Tr.  TTardy  has  the  honour  of  inventing  a  new 
gf>rt  nf  gampf  whirh  may  be  called  the  extrav- 
agance of  depression.  The  placing  of  the 
weak  lover  and  his  new  love  in  such  a  place 
that  they  actually  see  the  black  flag  announc- 
ing that  Tess  has  been  hanged  is  utterly 
inexcusable  in  art  and  probability;  it  is  a 
cruel  practical  joke.  But  it  is  a  practical  joke 
at  which  even  its  author  cannot  brighten  up 
enough  to  laugh. 

But  it  is  when  we  consider  the  great  artistic 
power  of  these  two  writers,  with  all  their 
eccentricities,  that  we  see  even  more  clearly 
that  free-thought  was,  as  it  were,  a  fight 
between  finger-posts.  For  it  is  the  remark- 
able fact  that  it  was  the  man  who  had  the 
healthy  and  manly  outlook  who  had  the 
crabbed  and  perverse  style;  it  was  the  man 
who  had  the  crabbed  and  perverse  outlook 


146    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

who  had  the  healthy  and  manly  style.  The 
reader  may  well  have  complained  of  paradox 
when  I  observed  above  that  Meredith,  unlike 
most  neo-Pagans,  did  in  his  way  take  Nature 
naturally.  It  may  be  suggested,  in  tones  of 
some  remonstrance,  that  things  like  "though 
pierced  by  the  cruel  acerb,"  or  "thy  fleeting- 
ness is  bigger  in  the  ghost,"  or  "her  gabbling 
grey  she  eyes  askant,"  or  "sheer  film  of  the 
surface  awag"  are  not  taking  Nature  natu- 
rally. And  this  is  true  of  Meredith's  style, 
but  it  is  not  true  of  his  spirit;  nor  even,  appar- 
ently, of  his  serious  opinions.  In  one  of  the 
poems  I  have  quoted  he  actually  says  of 
those  who  live  nearest  to  that  Nature  he 
was  always  praising — 

"Have  they  but  held  her  laws  and  nature 

dear, 
They  mouth  no  sentence  of  inverted  wit"; 

which  certainly  was  what  Meredith  himself 
was  doing  most  of  the  tune.  But  a  similar 
paradox  of  the  combination  of  plain  tastes 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    147 

with  twisted  phrases  can  also  be  seen  in 
Browning.  Something  of  the  same  can  be 
seen  in  many  of  the  cavalier  poets.  I  do 
not  understand  it:  it  may  be  that  the  fertil- 
ity of  a  cheerful  mind  crowds  everything,  so 
that  the  tree  is  entangled  m  its  own  branches; 
or  it  may  be  that  the  cheerful  mind  cares 
less  whether  it  is  understood  or  not;  as  a  man 
is  less  articulate  when  he  is  humming  than 
when  he  is  calling  for  help. 

Certainly  Meredith  suffers  from  applying 
a  complex  method  to  men  and  things  he  does 
not  mean  to  be  complex;  nay,  honestly 
admires  for  being  simple.  The  conversations 
between  Diana  and  Redworth  fail  of  their 
full  contrast  because  Meredith  can  afford 
the  twopence  for  Diana  coloured,  but  can- 
not afford  the  penny  for  Redworth  plain. 
Meredith's  ideals  were  neither  sceptical  nor 
finicky:  but  they  can  be  called  insufficient. 
He  had,  perhaps,  over  and  above  his  honest 
Pantheism  two  convictions  profound  enough 
to  be  called  prejudices.  He  was  probably  of 


148    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

Welsh  blood,  certainly  of  Celtic  sympathies, 
and  he  set  himself  more  swiftly  though  more 
subtly  than  Ruskin  or  Swinburne  to  under- 
mining the  enormous  complacency  of  John 
Bull.  He  also  had  a  sincere  hope  in  the 
strength  of  womanhood,  and  may  be  said, 
almost  without  hyperbole,  to  have  begotten 
gigantic  daughters.  He  may  yet  suffer  for 
his  chivalric  interference  as  many  champions 
do.  I  have  little  doubt  that  when  St.  George 
had  killed  the  dragon  he  was  heartily  afraid 
of  the  princess.  But  certainly  neither  of 
these  two  vital  enthusiasms  touched  the 
Victorian  trouble.  The  disaster  of  the  mod- 
ern English  is  not  that  they  are  not  Celtic,  but 
that  they  are  not  English.  The  tragedy  of 
the  modern  woman  is  not  that  she  is  not 
allowed  to  follow  man,  but  that  she  follows 
him  far  too  slavishly.  This  conscious  and 
theorising  Meredith  did  not  get  very  near 
his  problem  and  is  certainly  miles  away  from 
ours.  But  the  other  Meredith  was  a  creator; 
which  means  a  god.  That  is  true  of  him 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    149 

which  is  true  of  so  different  a  man  as  Dickens, 
that  all  one  can  say  of  him  is  that  he  is  full 
of  good  things.  A  reader  opening  one  of  his 
books  feels  like  a  schoolboy  opening  a  hamper 
which  he  knows  to  have  somehow  cost  a 
hundred  pounds.  He  may  be  more  bewil- 
dered by  it  than  by  an  ordinary  hamper;  but 
he  gets  the  impression  of  a  real  richness  of 
thought;  and  that  is  what  one  really  gets 
from  such  riots  of  felicity  as  Evan  Harrington 
or  Harry  Richmond.  His  philosophy  may  be 
barren,  but  he  was  not.  And  the  chief  feeling 
among  those  that  enjoy  him  is  a  mere  wish 
that  more  people  could  enjoy  him  too. 

I  end  here  upon  Hardy  and  Meredith; 
because  this  parting  of  the  ways  to  ftpen 
optimism  and  open  pessimism  really_wjas-ihe 
end  of  the  Victorian  peace.  There  are  many 
other  men,  very  nearly  as  great,  on  whom 
I  might  delight  to  linger:  on  Shorthouse, 
for  instance,  who  in  one  way  goes  with 
Mrs.  Browning  or  Coventry  Patmore.  I 
mean  that  he  has  a  wide  culture,  which  is 


150    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

called  by  some  a  narrow  religion.  When  we 
think  what  even  the  best  novels  about 
cavaliers  have  been  (written  by  men  like 
Scott  or  Stevenson)  it  is  a  wonderful  thing 
that  the  author  of  John  Inglesant  could  write 
a  cavalier  romance  in  which  he  forgot  Crom- 
well but  remembered  Hobbes.  But  Short- 
house  is  outside  the  period  in  fiction  in  the 
same  sort  of  way  in  which  Francis  Thompson 
is  outside  it  in  poetry.  He  did  not  accept  the 
Victorian  basis.  He  knew  too  much. 

There  is  one  more  matter  that  may  best 
be  considered  here,  though  briefly:  it  illus- 
trates the  extreme  difficulty  of  dealing  with 
the  Victorian  English  in  a  book  like  this, 
because  of  their  eccentricity;  not  of  opinions, 
but  of  character  and  artistic  form.  There 
are  several  great  Victorians  who  will  not  fit 
into  any  of  the  obvious  categories  I  employ; 
because  they  will  not  fit  into  anything,  hardly 
into  the  world  itself.  Where  Germany  or 
Italy  would  relieve  the  monotony  of  man- 
kind by  paying  serious  respect  to  an  artist, 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    151 

or  a  scholar,  or  a  patriotic  warrior,  or  a  priest 
— it  was  always  the  instinct  of  the  English  to 
do  it  by  pointing  out  a  Character.  Dr. 
Johnson  has  faded  as  a  poet  or  a  critic,  but 
he  survives  as  a  Character.  Cobbett  is 
neglected  (unfortunately)  as  a  publicist  and 
pamphleteer,  but  he  is  remembered  as  a 
Character.  Now  these  people  continued  to 
crop  up  through  the  Victorian  tune;  and 
each  stands  so  much  by  himself  that  I  shall 
end  these  pages  with  a  profound  suspicion 
that  I  have  forgotten  to  mention  a  Character 
of  gigantic  dimensions.  Perhaps  the  best  ex- 
ample of  such  eccentrics  is  George  Borrow; 
who  sympathised  with  unsuccessful  nomads 
like  the  gipsies  while  every  one  else  sympa- 
thised with  successful  nomads  like  the  Jews; 
who  had  a  genius  like  the  west  wind  for  the 
awakening  of  wild  and  casual  friendships  and 
the  drag  and  attraction  of  the  roads.  But 
whether  George  Borrow  ought  to  go  into  the 
section  devoted  to  philosophers,  or  the  sec- 
tion devoted  to  novelists,  or  the  section  de- 


152    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

voted  to  liars,  nobody  else  has  ever  known, 
even  if  he  did. 

But  the  strongest  case  of  this  Victorian 
power  of  being  abruptly  original  in  a  corner 
can  be  found  in  two  things:  the  literature 
meant  merely  for  children  and  the  literature 
meant  merely  for  fun.  It  is  true  that  these 
two  very  Victorian  things  often  melted  into 
each  other  (as  was  the  way  of  Victorian 
things),  but  not  sufficiently  to  make  it  safe 
to  mass  them  together  without  distinction. 
Thus  there  was  George  Macdonald,  a  Scot  of 
genius  as  genuine  as  Carlyle's;  he  could 
write  fairy-tales  that  made  all  experience  a 
fairy-tale.  He  could  give  the  real  sense  that 
every  one  had  the  end  of  an  elfin  thread  that 
must  at  last  lead  them  into  Paradise.  It  was 
a  sort  of  optimist  Calvinism.  But  such  really 
significant  fairy-tales  were  accidents  of  gen- 
ius. Of  the  Victorian  Afte  as  a  whojejl  is  true 
to  say  that  it  did  discover  a  new^  thing;  a 
thing  called JNon.gense.  It  may  be  doubted 
whether  this  thing  was  really  invented  to 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    153 

please  children.  Rather  it  was  invented  by 
old  people  trying  to  prove  their  first  child- 
hood, and  sometimes  succeeding  only  in  prov- 
ing their  second.  But  whatever  else  the 
thing  was,  it  was  English  and  it  was  individ- 
ual. Lewis  Carroll  gave  mathematics  a  holi- 
day: he  carried  logic  into  the  wild  lands  of 
illogicality.  Edward  Lear,  a  richer,  more  ro- 
mantic and  therefore  more  truly  Victorian 
buffoon,  improved  the  experiment.  But  the 
more  we  study  it,  the  more  we  shall,  I  think, 
conclude  that  it  reposed  on  something  more 
real  and  profound  in  the  Victorians  than  even 
their  just  and  exquisite  appreciation  of  chil- 
dren. T^yarpp  from  t.hp.  dftpp  Viofofifi.n  spnsft 
of  humour, 

It  may  appear,  because  I  have  used  from 
time  to  tune  the  only  possible  phrases  for  the 
case,  that  I  mean  the  Victorian  Englishman 
to  appear  as  a  blockhead,  which  means  an 
unconscious  buffoon.  To  all  this  there  is  a 
final  answer:  that  he  was  also  a  conscious 
buffoon — and  a  successful  one.  He  was  a 


154    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

humorist;  and  one  of  the  best  humorists 
in  Europe.  That  which  Goethe  had  never 
taught  the  Germans,  Byron  did  manage  to 
teach  the  English — the  duty  of  not  taking 
him  seriously.  The  strong  and  shrewd 
Victorian  humour  appears  in  every  slash  of 
the  pencil  of  Charles  Keene;  in  every  under- 
graduate inspiration  of  Calverley  or  "Q."  or 
J.  K.  S.  They  had  largely  forgotten  both 
art  and  arms:  but  the  gods  had  left  them 
laughter. 

But  the  final  proof  that  the  Victorians  were 
alive  by  this  laughter,  can  be  found  in  the 
fact  they  could  manage  and  master  for  a 
moment  even  the  cosmopolitan  modern 
theatre.  They  could  contrive  to  put  "The 
Bab  Ballads"  on  the  stage.  To  turn  a  pri- 
vate name  into  a  public  epithet  is  a  thing 
given  to  few:  but  the  word  "Gilbertian" 
will  probably  last  longer  than  the  name 
Gilbert. 

It  meant  a  real  Victorian  talent;  that  of 
exploding  unexpectedly  and  almost,  as  it 


GREAT  VICTORIAN  NOVELISTS    155 

seemed,  unintentionally.  Gilbert  made  good 
jokes  by  the  thousand;  but  he  never  (in  his 
best  days)  made  the  joke  that  could  possibly 
have  been  expected  of  him.  This  is  the  last 
essential  of  the  Victorian.  Laugh  at  him  as  a 
limited  man,  a  moralist,  conventionalist,  an 
opportunist,  a  formalist.  But  remember  also 
that  he  was  really  a  humorist;  and  may  still 
be  laughing  at  you. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN   POETS 

WHAT  was  really  unsatisfactory  in  Victo- 
rian literature  is  something  much  easier  to  feel 
than  to  state.  It  was  not  so  much  a  superi- 
ority in  the  men  of  other  ages  to  the  Victorian 
men.  It  was  a  superiority  of  Victorian  men 
to  themselves.  The  individual  was  unequal. 
Perhaps  that  is  why  the  society  became  un- 
equal: I  cannot  say.  They  were  lame  giants; 
the  strongest  of  them  walked  on  one  leg  a 
little  shorter  than  the  other.  A  great  man  in 
any  age  must  be  a  common  man,  and  also  an 
uncommon  man.  Those  that  are  only  un- 
common men  are  perverts  and  sowers  of 
pestilence.  But  somehow  the  great  Victorian 
man  was  more  and  less  than  this.  He  was 
at  once  a  giant  and  a  dwarf.  When  he  has 
been  sweeping  the  sky  hi  circles  infinitely 

156 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    157 

great,  he  suddenly  shrivels  into  something 
indescribably  small.  There  is  a  moment 
when  Carlyle  turns  suddenly  from  a  high 
creative  mystic  to  a  common  Calvinist. 
There  are  moments  when  George  Eliot  turns 
from  a  prophetess  into  a  governess.  There 
are  also  moments  when  Ruskin  turns  into  a 
governess,  without  even  the  excuse  of  sex. 
But  in  all  these  cases  the  alteration  comes 
as  a  thing  quite  abrupt  and  unreasonable. 
We  do  not  feel  this  acute  angle  any  where 
in  Homer  or  hi  Virgil  or  in  Chaucer  or  hi 
Shakespeare  or  in  Dry  den;  such  things  as 
they  knew  they  knew.  It  is  no  disgrace  to 
Homer  that  he  had  not  discovered  Britain; 
or  to  Virgil  that  he  had  not  discovered 
America;  or  to  Chaucer  that  he  had  not 
discovered  the  solar  system;  or  to  Dry  den 
that  he  had  not  discovered  the  steam-engine. 
But  we  do  most  frequently  feel,  with  the 
Victorians,  that  the  very  vastness  of  the 
number  of  things  they  know  illustrates  the 
abrupt  abyss  of  the  things  they  do  not  know. 


158    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

We  feel,  in  a  sort  of  way,  that  it  is  a  disgrace 
to  a  man  like  Carlyle  when  he  asks  the  Irish 
why  they  do  not  bestir  themselves  and  re- 
forest their  country:  saying  not  a  word  about 
the  soaking  up  of  every  sort  of  profit  by  the 
landlords  which  made  that  and  every  other 
Irish  improvement  impossible.  We  feel  that 
it  is  a  disgrace  to  a  man  like  Ruskin  when  he 
says,  with  a  solemn  visage,  that  building  in 
iron  is  ugly  and  unreal,  but  that  the  weighti- 
est objection  is  that  there  is  no  mention  of  it 
in  the  Bible;  we  feel  as  if  he  had  just  said  he 
could  find  no  hair-brushes  in  Habakkuk.  We 
feel  that  it  is  a  disgrace  to  a  man  like  Thack- 
eray when  he  proposes  that  people  should  be 
forcibly  prevented  from  being  nuns,  merely 
because  he  has  no  fixed  intention  of  becoming 
a  nun  himself.  We  feel  that  it  is  a  disgrace 
to  a  man  like  Tennyson,  when  he  talks  of  the 
French  revolutions,  the  huge  crusades  that 
had  recreated  the  whole  of  his  civilisation, 
as  being  "no  graver  than  a  schoolboy's 
barring  out."  We  feel  that  it  is  a  disgrace 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    159 

to  a  man  like  Browning  to  make  spluttering 
and  spiteful  puns  about  the  names  Newman, 
Wiseman,  and  Manning.  We  feel  that  it 
is  a  disgrace  to  a  man  like  Newman  when 
he  confesses  that  for  some  time  he  felt 
as  if  he  couldn't  come  in  to  the  Catholic 
Church,  because  of  that  dreadful  Mr.  Daniel 
O'Connell,  who  had  the  vulgarity  to  fight 
for  his  own  country.  We  feel  that  it  is  a 
disgrace  to  a  man  like  Dickens,  when  he 
makes  a  blind  brute  and  savage  out  of  a  man 
like  St.  Dunstan;  it  sounds  as  if  it  were  not 
Dickens  talking  but  Dombey.  We  feel  it  is 
a  disgrace  to  a  man  like  Swinburne,  when  he 
has  a  Jingo  fit  and  calls  the  Boer  children  in 
the  concentration  camps  "Whelps  of  treacher- 
ous dams  whom  none  save  we  have  spared  to 
starve  and  slay":  we  feel  that  Swinburne, 
for  the  first  time,  really  has  become  an  im- 
moral and  indecent  writer.  All  this  is  a  cer- 
tain odd  provincialism  peculiar  to  the  Eng- 
lish in  that  great  century:  they  were  in  a 
kind  of  pocket;  they  appealed  to  too  narrow 


160    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

a  public  opinion;  I  am  certain  that  no  French 
or  German  men  of  the  same  genius  made  such 
remarks.  Renan  was  the  enemy  of  the  Cath- 
olic Church;  but  who  can  imagine  Renan 
writing  of  it  as  Kingsley  or  Dickens  did? 
Taine  was  the  enemy  of  the  French  Revolu- 
tion; but  who  can  imagine  Taine  talking 
about  it  as  Tennyson  or  Newman  talked? 
Even  Matthew  Arnold,  though  he  saw  this 
peril  and  prided  himself  on  escaping  it,  did 
not  altogether  escape  it.  There  must  be 
(to  use  an  Irishism)  something  shallow  in  the 
depths  of  any  man  who  talks  about  the 
Zeitgeist  as  if  it  were  a  living  thing. 

But  this  defect  is  very  specially  the  key 
to  the  case  of  the  two  great  Victorian  poets, 
Tennyson  and  Browning;  the  two  spirited 
or  beautiful  tunes,  so  to  speak,  to  which  the 
other  events  marched  or  danced.  It  was 
especially  so  of  Tennyson,  for  a  reason  which 
raises  some  of  the  most  real  problems  about 
his  poetry.  Tennyson,  of  course,  owed  a 
great  deal  to  Virgil.  There  is  no  question  of 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    161 

plagiarism  here;  a  debt  to  Virgil  is  like  a 
debt  to  Nature.  But  Tennyson  was  a 
provincial  Virgil.  In  such  passages  as  that 
about  the  schoolboy's  barring  out  he  might 
be  called  a  suburban  Virgil.  I  mean  that  he 
tried  to  have  the  universal  balance  of  all  the 
ideas  at  which  the  great  Roman  had  aimed: 
but  he  hadn't  got  hold  of  all  the  ideas  to 
balance.  Hence  his  work  was  not  a  balance  of 
truths,  like  the  universe.  It  was  a  balance 
of  whims;  like  the  British  Constitution.  It 
is  intensely  typical  of  Tennyson's  philosophi- 
cal temper  that  he  was  almost  the  only  Poet 
Laureate  who  was  not  ludicrous.  It  is  not 
absurd  to  think  of  Tennyson  as  tuning  his 
harp  in  praise  of  Queen  Victoria:  that  is,  it  is 
not  absurd  in  the  same  sense  as  Chaucer's 
harp  hallowed  by  dedication  to  Richard  II 
or  Wordsworth's  harp  hallowed  by  dedication 
to  George  IV  is  absurd.  Richard's  court  could 
not  properly  appreciate  either  Chaucer's  dai- 
sies or  his  "devotion."  George  IV  would  not 
have  gone  pottering  about  Helvellyn  in  search 


162    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

of  purity  and  the  simple  annals  of  the  poor. 
But  Tennyson  did  sincerely  believe  in  the 
Victorian  compromise;  and  sincerity  is  never 
undignified.  He  really  did  hold  a  great 
many  of  the  same  views  as  Queen  Victoria, 
though  he  was  gifted  with  a  more  fortunate 
literary  style.  If  Dickens  is  Cobbett's 
democracy  stirring  in  its  grave,  Tennyson  is 
the  exquisitely  ornamental  extinguisher  on 
the  flame  of  the  first  revolutionary  poets. 
England  has  settled  down;  England  has 
become  Victorian.  The  compromise  was 
interesting,  it  was  national  and  for  a  long 
time  it  was  successful:  there  is  still  a  great 
deal  to  be  said  for  it.  But  it  was  as  freakish 
and  unphilosophic,  as  arbitrary  and  untrans- 
latable, as  a  beggar's  patched  coat  or  a  child's 
secret  language.  Now  it  is  here  that  Brown- 
ing had  a  certain  odd  advantage  over  Tenny- 
son; which  has,  perhaps,  somewhat  exag- 
gerated his  intellectual  superiority  to  him. 
Browning's  eccentric  style  was  more  suitable 
to  the  poetry  of  a  nation  of  eccentrics;  of 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    163 

people  for  the  time  being  removed  far  from 
the  centre  of  intellectual  interests.  The 
hearty  and  pleasant  task  of  expressing  one's 
intense  dislike  of  something  one  doesn't 
understand  is  much  more  poetically  achieved 
by  saying,  in  a  general  way  "Grrr — you 
swine!"  than  it  is  by  laboured  lines  such  as 
"the  red  fool-fury  of  the  Seine."  We  all  feel 
that  there  is  more  of  the  man  in  Browning 
here;  more  of  Dr.  Johnson  or  Cobbett. 
Browning  is  the  Englishman  taking  himself 
wilfully,  following  his  nose  like  a  bull-dog, 
going  by  his  own  likes  and  dislikes.  We  can- 
not help  feeling  that  Tennyson  is  the  English- 
man taking  himself  seriously — an  awful  sight. 
One's  memory  flutters  unhappily  over  a  cer- 
tain letter  about  the  Papal  Guards  written 
by  Sir  Willoughby  Patterne.  It  is  here 
chiefly  that  Tennyson  suffers  by  that  very 
Virgilian  loveliness  and  dignity  of  diction 
which  he  put  to  the  service  of  such  a  small  and 
anomalous  national  scheme.  Virgil  had  the 
best  news  to  tell  as  well  as  the  best  words  to 


164    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

tell  it  in.  His  world  might  be  sad;  but  it  was 
the  largest  world  one  could  live  in  before  the 
coming  of  Christianity.  If  he  told  the  Ro- 
mans to  spare  the  vanquished  and  to  war 
down  the  mighty,  at  least  he  was  more  or 
less  well  informed  about  who  were  mighty 
and  who  were  vanquished.  But  when  Ten- 
nyson wrote  verses  like — 

"Of  freedom  in  her  regal  seat, 
Of  England;  not  the  schoolboy  heat, 
The  blind  hysterics  of  the  Celt" 

he  quite  literally  did  not  know  one  word  of 
what  he  was  talking  about;  he  did  not  know 
what  Celts  are,  or  what  hysterics  are,  or  what 
freedom  was,  or  what  regal  was  or  even 
of  what  England  was — in  the  living  Europe 
of  that  time. 

His  religious  range  was  very  much  wider 
and  wiser  than  his  political;  but  here  also 
he  suffered  from  treating  as  true  universality 
a  thing  that  was  only  a  sort  of  lukewarm  local 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    165 

patriotism.  Here  also  he  suffered  by  the 
very  splendour  and  perfection  of  his  poetical 
powers.  He  was  quite  the  opposite  of  the 
man  who  cannot  express  himself;  the  in- 
articulate singer  who  dies  with  all  his  music  in 
him.  He  had  a  great  deal  to  say;  but  he 
had  much  more  power  of  expression  than  was 
wanted  for  anything  he  had  to  express.  He 
could  not  think  up  to  the  height  of  his  own 
towering  style. 

For  whatever  else  Tennyson  was,  he  was  a 
great  poet;  no  mind  that  feels  itself  free, 
that  is,  above  the  ebb  and  flow  of  fashion,  can 
feel  anything  but  contempt  for  the  later  effort 
to  discredit  him  in  that  respect.  It  is  true 
that,  like  Browning  and  almost  every  other 
Victorian  poet,  he  was  really  two  poets.  But 
it  is  just  to  him  to  insist  that  in  his  case 
(unlike  Browning's)  both  the  poets  were  good. 
The  first  is  more  or  less  like  Stevenson  in 
metre;  it  is  a  magical  luck  or  skill  in  the  mere 
choice  of  words.  "Wet  sands  marbled  with 
moon  and  cloud  " — "  Flits  by  the  sea-blue  bird 


166    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

of  March" — "Leafless  ribs  and  iron  horns" 
— "When  the  long  dun  wolds  are  ribbed 
with  snow" — in  all  these  cases  one  word 
is  the  keystone  of  an  arch  which  would  fall 
into  ruin  without  it.  But  there  are  other 
strong  phrases  that  recall  not  Stevenson  but 
rather  their  common  master,  Virgil — "Tears 
from  the  depths  of  some  divine  despair" — 
"There  is  fallen  a  splendid  tear  from  the  pas- 
sion-flower at  the  gate" — "Was  a  great 
water;  and  the  moon  was  full" — "God  made 
Himself  an  awful  rose  of  dawn."  These  do 
not  depend  on  a  word  but  on  an  idea:  they 
might  even  be  translated.  It  is  also  true,  I 
think,  that  he  was  first  and  last  a  lyric  poet. 
He  was  always  best  when  he  expressed  him- 
self shortly.  In  long  poems  he  had  an  unfor- 
tunate habit  of  eventually  saying  very  nearly 
the  opposite  of  what  he  meant  to  say.  I  will 
take  only  two  instances  of  what  I  mean. 
In  the  Idylls  of  the  King,  and  in  In  Memoriam 
(his  two  sustained  and  ambitious  efforts), 
particular  phrases  are  always  flashing  out  the 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    167 

Whole  fire  of  the  truth;  the  truth  that  Tenny- 
son meant.  But  owing  to  his  English  indo- 
lence, his  English  aristocratic  irresponsibility, 
his  English  vagueness  in  thought,  he  always 
managed  to  make  the  main  poem  mean 
exactly  what  he  did  not  mean.  Thus,  these 
two  lines  which  simply  say  that 

"Lancelot  was  the  first  in  tournament, 
But  Arthur  mightiest  in  the  battle-field" 

do  really  express  what  he  meant  to  express 
about  Arthur  being  after  all  "the  highest, 
yet  most  human  too;  not  Lancelot,  nor 
another."  But  as  his  hero  is  actually 
developed,  we  have  exactly  the  opposite 
impression;  that  poor  old  Lancelot,  with  all 
his  faults,  was  much  more  of  a  man  than 
Arthur.  He  was  a  Victorian  in  the  bad  as 
well  as  the  good  sense;  he  could  not  keep 
priggishness  out  of  long  poems.  Or  again, 
take  the  case  of  In  Memoriam.  I  will  quote 
one  verse  (probably  incorrectly)  which  has 
always  seemed  to  me  splendid,  and  which 


168    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

does  express  what  the  whole  poem  should 
express — but  hardly  does. 

"That  we  may  lift  from  out  the  dust, 
A  voice  as  unto  him  that  hears 
A  cry  above  the  conquered  years 
Of  one  that  ever  works,  and  trust." 

The  poem  should  have  been  a  cry  above  the 
conquered  years.  It  might  well  have  been 
that  if  the  poet  could  have  said  sharply  at 
the  end  of  it,  as  a  pure  piece  of  dogma,  "I've 
forgotten  every  feature  of  the  man's  face:  I 
know  God  holds  him  alive."  But  under  the 
influence  of  the  mere  leisurely  length  of  the 
thing,  the  reader  does  rather  receive  the  im- 
pression that  the  wound  has  been  healed 
only  by  time;  and  that  the  victor  hours  can 
boast  that  this  is  the  man  that  loved  and 
lost,  but  all  he  was  is  overworn.  This  is  not 
the  truth;  and  Tennyson  did  not  intend  it 
for  the  truth.  It  is  siirply  the  result  of  the 
lack  of  something  militant,  dogmatic  and 
structural  in  him:  whereby  he  could  not  be 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    169 

trusted  with  the  trail  of  a  very  long  literary 
process  without  entangling  himself  like  a 
kitten  playing  cat's-cradle. 

Browning,  as  above  suggested,  got  on  much 
better  with  eccentric  and  secluded  ,England 
because  he  treated  it  as  eccentric  and  secluded; 
a  place  where  one  could  do  what  one  liked. 
To  a  considerable  extent  he  did  do  what  he 
liked;  arousing  not  a  few  complaints;  and 
many  doubts  and  conjectures  as  to  why  on 
earth  he  liked  it.  Many  comparatively  sym- 
pathetic persons  pondered  upon  what  pleasure 
it  could  give  any  man  to  write  Sordello  or 
rhyme  "end-knot"  to  "offend  not."  Never- 
theless he  was  no  anarchist  and  no  mysta- 
gogue;  and  even  where  he  was  defective,  his 
defect  has  commonly  been  stated  wrongly. 
The  two  chief  charges  against  him  were  a  con- 
tempt for  form  unworthy  of  an  artist,  and  a 
poor  pride  in  obscurity.  The  obscurity  is 
true,  though  not,  I  think,  the  pride  in  it;  but 
the  truth  about  this  charge  rather  rises  out  of 
the  truth  about  the  other.  The  other  charge 


170    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

is  not  true.  Browning  cared  very  much,  for 
form;  lie  cared  very  much  for  style.  You 
may  not  happen  to  like  his  style;  but  he 
did.  To  say  that  he  had  not  enough  mastery 
over  form  to  express  himself  perfectly  like 
Tennyson  or  Swinburne  is  like  criticising  the 
griffin  of  a  mediaeval  gargoyle  without  even 
knowing  that  it  is  a  griffin;  treating  it  as  an 
infantile  and  unsuccessful  attempt  at  a  classi- 
cal angel.  A  poet  indifferent  to  form  ought  to 
mean  a  poet  who  did  not  care  what  form  he 
used  as  long  as  he  expressed  his  thoughts. 
He  might  be  a  rather  entertaining  sort  of  poet; 
telling  a  smoking-room  story  in  blank  verse 
or  writing  a  hunting-song  in  the  Spenserian 
stanza;  giving  a  realistic  analysis  of  infanti- 
cide in  a  series  of  triolets;  or  proving  the 
truth  of  Immortality  in  a  long  string  of  lim- 
ericks. Browning  certainly  had  no  such  indif- 
ference. Almost  every  poem  of  Browning, 
especially  the  shortest  and  most  successful 
ones,  was  moulded  or  graven  in  some  special 
style,  generally  grotesque,  but  invariably 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    171 

deliberate.  In  most  cases  whenever  lie  wrote 
a  new  song  he  wrote  a  new  kind  of  song.  The 
new  lyric  is  not  only  of  a  different  metre,  but 
of  a  different  shape.  No  one,  not  even  Brown- 
ing, ever  wrote  a  poem  in  the  same  style  as 
that  horrible  one  beginning  "John,  Master  of 
the  Temple  of  God,"  with  its  weird  choruses 
and  creepy  prose  directions.  No  one,  not 
even  Browning,  ever  wrote  a  poem  in  the  same 
style  as  Pisgah-sights.  No  one,  not  even 
Browning,  ever  wrote  a  poem  in  the  same  style 
as  Time's  Revenges.  No  one,  not  even  Brown- 
ing, ever  wrote  a  poem  in  the  same  style  as 
Meeting  at  Night  and  Parting  at  Morning.  No 
one,  not  even  Browning,  ever  wrote  a  poem  in 
the  same  style  as  The  Flight  of  the  Duchess,  or 
in  the  same  style  as  The  Grammarian1  s  Fu- 
neral, or  in  the  same  style  as  A  Star,  or  in  the 
same  style  as  that  astounding  lyric  which 
begins  abruptly  "Some  people  hang  pictures 
up."  These  metres  and  manners  were  not 
accidental;  they  really  do  suit  the  sort  of 
spiritual  experiment  Browning  was  making  in 


172    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

each  case.  Browning,  then,  was  not  chaotic; 
he  was  deliberately  grotesque.  But  there 
certainly  was,  over  and  above  this  grotesque- 
ness,  a  perversity  and  irrationality  about  the 
man  which  led  him  to  play  the  fool  in  the 
middle  of  his  own  poems;  to  leave  off  carving 
gargoyles  and  simply  begin  throwing  stones. 
His  curious  complicated  puns  are  an  example 
of  this:  Hood  had  used  the  pun  to  make 
a  sentence  or  a  sentiment  especially  pointed 
and  clear.  In  Browning  the  word  with  two 
meanings  seems  to  mean  rather  less,  if  any- 
thing, than  the  word  with  one.  It  also  applies 
to  his  trick  of  setting  himself  to  cope  with 
impossible  rhymes.  It  may  be  fun,  though 
it  is  not  poetry,  to  try  rhyming  to  ranunculus; 
but  even  the  fun  presupposes  that  you  do 
rhyme  to  it;  and  I  will  affirm,  and  hold  under 
persecution,  that  "Tommy-make-room-for- 
your-uncle-us"  does  not  rhyme  to  it. 

The  obscurity,  to  which  he  must  in  a  large 
degree  plead  guilty,  was,  curiously  enough, 
the  result  rather  of  the  gay  artist  in  him  than 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    173 

the  deep  thinker.  It  is  patience  in  the  Brown- 
ing students;  in  Browning  it  was  only  im- 
patience. He  wanted  to  say  something  comic 
and  energetic  and  he  wanted  to  say  it  quick. 
And,  between  his  artistic  skill  in  the  fantastic 
and  his  temperamental  turn  for  the  abrupt, 
the  idea  sometimes  flashed  past  unseen. 
But  it  is  quite  an  error  to  suppose  that  these 
are  the  dark  mines  containing  his  treasure. 
The  two  or  three  great  and  true  things  he 
really  had  to  say  he  generally  managed  to  say 
quite  simply.  Thus  he  really  did  want  to  say 
that  God  had  indeed  made  man  and  woman 
one  flesh;  that  the  sex  relation  was  religious 
in  this  real  sense  that  even  in  our  sin  and 
despair  we  take  it  for  granted  and  expect  a 
sort  of  virtue  in  it.  The  feelings  of  the  bad 
husband  about  the  good  wife,  for  instance, 
are  about  as  subtle  and  entangled  as  any 
matter  on  this  earth;  and  Browning  really 
had  something  to  say  about  them.  But  he 
said  it  in  some  of  the  plainest  and  most  un- 
mistakable words  in  all  literature;  as  lucid 


174    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

as  a  flash  of  lightning.  "Pompilia,  will  you 
let  them  murder  me?"  Or  again,  he  did 
really  want  to  say  that  death  and  such  moral 
terrors  were  best  taken  in  a  military  spirit; 
he  could  not  have  said  it  more  simply  than: 
"I  was  ever  a  fighter;  one  fight  more,  the 
best  and  the  last."  He  did  really  wish  to  say 
that  human  life  was  unworkable  unless  im- 
mortality were  implied  in  it  every  other 
moment;  he  could  not  have  said  it  more 
simply:  "leave  now  to  dogs  and  apes;  Man 
has  for  ever."  The  obscurities  were  not 
merely  superficial,  but  often  covered  quite 
superficial  ideas.  He  was  as  likely  as  not  to  be 
most  unintelligible  of  all  in  writing  a  com- 
pliment in  a  lady's  album.  I  remember 
in  my  boyhood  (when  Browning  kept  us 
awake  like  coffee)  a  friend  reading  out  the 
poem  about  the  portrait  to  which  I  have 
already  referred,  reading  it  in  that  rapid  dra- 
matic way  in  which  this  poet  must  be  read. 
And  I  was  profoundly  puzzled  at  the  passage 
where  it  seemed  to  say  that  the  cousin  dis- 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    175 

paraged  the  picture,  "while  John  scorns  ale." 
I  could  not  think  what  this  sudden  teetotal- 
ism  on  the  part  of  John  had  to  do  with  the 
affair,  but  I  forgot  to  ask  at  the  time  and  it 
was  only  years  afterwards  that,  looking  at 
the  book,  I  found  it  was  "John's  corns  ail," 
a  very  Browningesque  way  of  saying  he 
winced.  Most  of  Browning's  obscurity  is  of 
that  sort — the  mistakes  are  almost  as  quaint 
as  misprints — and  the  Browning  student,  in 
that  sense,  is  more  a  proof  reader  than  a  dis- 
ciple. For  the  rest  his  real  religion  was  of  the 
most  manly,  even  the  most  boyish  sort.  He  is 
called  an  optimist;  but  the  word  suggests  a 
calculated  contentment  which  was  not  in  the 
least  one  of  his  vices.  What  he  really  was 
was  a  romantic.  He  offered  the  cosmos  as  an 
adventure  rather  than  a  scheme.  He  did 
not  explain  evil,  far  less  explain  it  away:  he 
enjoyed  defying  it.  He  was  a  troubadour 
even  in  theology  and  metaphysics:  like  the 
Jongleurs  de  Dieu  of  St.  Francis.  He  may  be 
said  to  have  serenaded  heaven  with  a  guitar, 


176    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

and  even,  so  to  speak,  tried  to  climb  there 
with  a  rope  ladder.  Thus  his  most  vivid 
things  are  the  red-hot  little  love  lyrics,  or 
rather,  little  love  dramas.  He  did  one  really 
original  and  admirable  thing :  he  managed  the 
real  details  of  modern  love  affairs  in  verse, 
and  love  is  the  most  realistic  thing  in  the 
world.  He  substituted  the  street  with  the 
green  blind  for  the  faded  garden  of  Watteau, 
and  the  "blue  spirt  of  a  lighted  match"  for 
the  monotony  of  the  evening  star. 

Before  leaving  him  it  should  be  added  that 
he  was  fitted  to  deepen  the  Victorian  mind, 
but  not  to  broaden  it.  With  all  his  Italian 
sympathies  and  Italian  residence,  he  was  not 
the  man  to  get  Victorian  England  out  of  its 
provincial  rut:  on  many  things  Kingsley 
himself  was  not  so  narrow.  His  celebrated 
wife  was  wider  and  wiser  than  he  in  this  sense; 
for  she  was,  however  one-sidedly,  involved 
in  the  emotions  of  central  European  politics. 
She  defended  Louis  Napoleon  and  Victor 
Emmanuel;  and  intelligently,  as  one  con- 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    177 

scious  of  the  case  against  them  both.  As  to 
why  it  now  seems  simple  to  defend  the  first 
Italian  King,  but  absurd  to  defend  the  last 
French  Emperor — well,  the  reason  is  sad  and 
simple.  It  is  concerned  with  certain  curious 
things  called  success  and  failure,  and  I  ought 
to  have  considered  it  under  the  heading  of 
The  Book  of  Snobs.  But  Elizabeth  Barrett, 
at  least,  was  no  snob:  her  political  poems 
have  rather  an  impatient  air,  as  if  they 
were  written,  and  even  published,  rather  pre- 
maturely— just  before  the  fall  of  her  idol. 
These  old  political  poems  of  hers  are  too  little 
read  to-day;  they  are  amongst  the  most 
sincere  documents  on  the  history  of  the  times, 
and  many  modern  blunders  could  be  cor- 
rected by  the  reading  of  them.  And  Eliza- 
beth Barrett  had  a  strength  really  rare 
among  women  poets;  the  strength  of  the 
phrase.  She  excelled  in  her  sex,  in  epigram, 
almost  as  much  as  Voltaire  in  his.  Pointed 
phrases  like:  "Martyrs  by  the  pang  without 
the  palm" — or  "Incense  to  sweeten  a  crime 


178    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

and  myrrh  to  embitter  a  curse,"  these  ex- 
pressions, which  are  witty  after  the  old 
fashion  of  the  conceit,  came  quite  freshly 
and  spontaneously  to  her  quite  modern  mind. 
But  the  first  fact  is  this,  that  these  epigrams 
of  hers  were  never  so  true  as  when  they 
turned  on  one  of  the  two  or  three  pivots  on 
which  contemporary  Europe  was  really  turn- 
ing. She  is  by  far  the  most  European  of 
all  the  English  poets  of  that  age;  all  of  them, 
even  her  own  much  greater  husband,  look 
local  beside  her.  Tennyson  and  the  rest 
are  nowhere.  Take  any  positive  political 
fact,  such  as  the  final  fall  of  Napoleon. 
Tennyson  wrote  these  profoundly  foolish 
lines — 

"He  thought  to  quell  the  stubborn  hearts 

of  oak 
Madman!'* 

as  if  the  defeat  of  an  English  regiment  were  a 
violation  of  the  laws  of  Nature.  Mrs.  Brown- 
ing knew  no  more  facts  about  Napoleon, 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    179 

perhaps,  than  Tennyson  did;  but  she  knew 
the  truth.  Her  epigram  on  Napoleon's  fall 
is  in  one  line 

"And  kings  crept  out  again  to  feel  the  sun." 

Talleyrand  would  have  clapped  his  horrible 
old  hands  at  that.  Her  instinct  about  the 
statesman  and  the  soldier  was  very  like  Jane 
Austen's  instinct  for  the  gentleman  and  the 
man.  It  is  not  unnoticeable  that  as  Miss 
Austen  spent  most  of  her  life  in  a  village, 
Miss  Barrett  spent  most  of  her  life  on  a  sofa. 
The  godlike  power  of  guessing  seems  (for 
some  reason  I  do  not  understand)  to  grow 
under  such  conditions.  Unfortunately  Mrs. 
Browning  was  like  all  the  other  Victorians 
in  going  a  little  lame,  as  I  have  roughly  called 
it,  having  one  leg  shorter  than  the  other. 
But  her  case  was,  in  one  sense,  extreme.  She 
exaggerated  both  ways.  She  was  too  strong 
and  too  weak,  or  (as  a  false  sex  philosophy 
would  express  it)  too  masculine  and  too 
feminine.  I  mean  that  she  hit  the  centre  of 


180    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

weakness  with  almost  the  same  emphatic 
precision  with  which  she  hit  the  centre  of 
strength.  She  could  write  finally  of  the 
factory  wheels  "grinding  life  down  from  its 
mark,"  a  strong  and  strictly  true  observation. 
Unfortunately  she  could  also  write  of  Eurip- 
ides "with  his  droppings  of  warm  tears." 
She  could  write  in  A  Drama  of  Exile,  a  really 
fine  exposition,  touching  the  later  relation  of 
Adam  and  the  animals:  unfortunately  the 
tears  were  again  turned  on  at  the  wrong 
moment  at  the  main;  and  the  stage  direction 
commands  a  silence,  only  broken  by  the 
dropping  of  angel's  tears.  How  much  noise 
is  made  by  angel's  tears?  Is  it  a  sound  of 
emptied  buckets,  or  of  garden  hose,  or  of 
mountain  cataracts?  That  is  the  sort  of 
question  which  Elizabeth  Barrett's  extreme 
love  of  the  extreme  was  always  tempting 
people  to  ask.  Yet  the  question,  as  asked, 
does  her  a  heavy  historical  injustice;  we 
remember  all  the  lines  in  her  work  which 
were  weak  enough  to  be  called  "womanly," 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    181 

we  forget  the  multitude  of  strong  lines  that 
are  strong  enough  to  be  called  "manly"; 
lines  that  Kingsley  or  Henley  would  have 
jumped  for  joy  to  print  in  proof  of  their 
manliness.  She  had  one  of  the  peculiar 
talents  of  true  rhetoric,  that  of  a  powerful 
concentration.  As  to  the  critic  who  thinks 
her  poetry  owed  anything  to  the  great  poet 
who  was  her  husband,  he  can  go  and  live  in 
the  same  hotel  with  the  man  who  can  believe 
that  George  Eliot  owed  anything  to  the  ex- 
travagant imagination  of  Mr.  George  Henry 
Lewes.  So  far  from  Browning  inspiring  or 
interfering,  he  did  not  in  one  sense  interfere 
enough.  Her  real  inferiority  to  him  in  litera- 
ture is  that  he  was  consciously  while  she  was 
unconsciously  absurd. 

It  is  natural,  in  the  matter  of  Victorian 
moral  change,  to  take  Swinburne  as  the  next 
name  here.  He  is  the  only  poet  who  was 
also,  in  the  European  sense,  on  the  spot; 
even  if,  in  the  sense  of  the  Gilbertian  song, 
the  spot  was  barred.  He  also  knew  that 


182    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

something  rather  crucial  was  happening  to 
Christendom;  he  thought  it  was  getting  un- 
christened.  It  is  even  a  little  amusing,  in- 
deed, that  these  two  Pro-Italian  poets  almost 
conducted  a  political  correspondence  in 
rhyme.  Mrs.  Browning  sternly  reproached 
those  who  had  ever  doubted  the  good  faith 
of  the  King  of  Sardinia,  whom  she  acclaimed 
as  being  truly  a  king.  Swinburne,  lyrically 
alluding  to  her  as  "Sea-eagle  of  English 
feather,"  broadly  hinted  that  the  chief 
blunder  of  that  wild  fowl  had  been  her 
support  of  an  autocratic  adventurer:  "calling 
a  crowned  man  royal,  that  was  no  more  than 
a  king."  But  it  is  not  fair,  even  in  this 
important  connection,  to  judge  Swinburne  by 
Songs  Before  Sunrise.  They  were  songs  before 
a  sunrise  that  has  never  turned  up.  Their 
dogmatic  assertions  have  for  a  long  time  past 
stared  starkly  at  us  as  nonsense.  As,  for 
instance,  the  phrase  "Glory  to  Man  in  the 
Highest,  for  man  is  the  master  of  things"; 
after  which  there  is  evidently  nothing  to  be 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    183 

said,  except  that  it  is  not  true.  But  even 
where  Swinburne  had  his  greater  grip,  as  in 
that  grave  and  partly  just  poem  Before  a 
Crucifix,  Swinburne,  the  most  Latin,  the  most 
learned,  the  most  largely  travelled  of  the 
Victorians,  still  knows  far  less  of  the  facts 
than  even  Mrs.  Browning.  The  whole  of  the 
poem,  Before  a  Crucifix,  breaks  down  by  one 
mere  mistake.  It  imagines  that  the  French 
or  Italian  peasants  who  fell  on  their  knees 
before  the  Crucifix  did  so  because  they  were 
slaves.  They  fell  on  their  knees  because  they 
were  free  men,  probably  owning  their  own 
farms.  Swinburne  could  have  found  round 
about  Putney  plenty  of  slaves  who  had  no 
crucifixes:  but  only  crucifixions. 

When  we  come  to  ethics  and  philosophy, 
doubtless  we  find  Swinburne  in  full  revolt,  not 
only  against  the  temperate  idealism  of  Tenny- 
son, but  against  the  genuine  piety  and  moral 
enthusiasm  of  people  like  Mrs.  Browning. 
But  here  again  Swinburne  is  very  English, 
nay,  he  is  very  Victorian,  for  his  revolt  is 


184    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

illogical.  For  the  purposes  of  intelligent 
insurrection  against  priests  and  kings,  Swin- 
burne ought  to  have  described  the  natural 
life  of  man,  free  and  beautiful,  and  proved 
from  this  both  the  noxiousness  and  the  need- 
lessness  of  such  chains.  Unfortunately  Swin- 
burne rebelled  against  Nature  first  and  then 
tried  to  rebel  against  religion  for  doing  ex- 
actly the  same  thing  that  he  had  done.  His 
songs  of  joy  are  not  really  immoral;  but 
his  songs  of  sorrow  are.  But  when  he  merely 
hurls  at  the  priest  the  assertion  that  flesh  is 
grass  and  life  is  sorrow,  he  really  lays  himself 
open  to  the  restrained  answer,  "So  I  have 
ventured,  on  various  occasions,  to  remark." 
When  he  went  forth,  as  it  were,  as  the  cham- 
pion of  pagan  change  and  pleasure,  he  heard 
uplifted  the  grand  choruses  of  his  own 
Atalanta,  in  his  rear,  refusing  hope. 

The  splendid  diction  that  blazes  through 
the  whole  of  that  drama,  that  still  dances 
exquisitely  in  the  more  lyrical  Poems  and 
Ballads,  makes  some  marvellous  appear- 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    185 

ances  in  Songs  Before  Sunrise,  and  then  mainly 
falters  and  fades  away,  is,  of  course,  the 
chief  thing  about  Swinburne.  The  style  is 
the  man;  and  some  will  add  that  it  does  not, 
thus  unsupported,  amount  to  much  of  a  man. 
But  the  style  itself  suffers  some  injustice 
from  those  who  would  speak  thus.  The  views 
expressed  are  often  quite  foolish  and  often 
quite  insincere;  but  the  style  itself  is  a  man- 
lier and  more  natural  thing  than  is  commonly 
made  out.  It  is  not  in  the  least  languorous 
or  luxurious  or  merely  musical  and  sensuous, 
as  one  would  gather  from  both  the  eulogies 
and  the  satires,  from  the  conscious  and  the 
unconscious  imitations.  On  the  contrary,  it 
is  a  sort  of  fighting  and  profane  parody  of  the 
Old  Testament;  and  its  lines  are  made  of 
short  English  words  like  the  short  Roman 
swords.  The  first  line  of  one  of  his  finest 
poems,  for  instance,  runs,  "I  have  lived  long 
enough  to  have  seen  one  thing,  that  love 
hath  an  end."  In  that  sentence  only  one 
small  "e"  gets  outside  the  monosyllable. 


186    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

Through  all  his  interminable  tragedies,  he 
was  fondest  of  lines  like — 

"If  ever  I  leave  off  to  honour  you 
God  give  me  shame;  I  were  the  worst  churl 
born." 

The  dramas  were  far  from  being  short  and 
dramatic;  but  the  words  really  were.  Nor 
was  his  verse  merely  smooth;  except  his  very 
bad  verse,  like  "the  lilies  and  languors  of 
virtue,  to  the  raptures  and  roses  of  vice," 
which  both,  in  cheapness  of  form  and  foolish- 
ness of  sentiment,  may  be  called  the  worst 
couplet  in  the  world's  literature.  In  his  real 
poetry  (even  in  the  same  poem)  his  rhythm 
and  rhyme  are  as  original  and  ambitious  as 
Browning;  and  the  only  difference  between 
him  and  Browning  is,  not  that  he  is  smooth 
and  without  ridges,  but  that  he  always  crests 
the  ridge  triumphantly  and  Browning  often 
does  not — 

"On  thy  bosom  though  many  a  kiss  be, 
There  are  none  such  as  knew  it  of  old. 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    187 

Was  it  Alciphron  once  or  Arisbe, 
Male  ringlets  or  feminine  gold, 
That  thy  lips  met  with  under  the  statue 
Whence  a  look  shot  out  sharp  after  thieves 
From  the  eyes  of  the  garden-god  at  you 
Across  the  fig-leaves." 

Look  at  the  rhymes  in  that  verse,  and  you 
will  see  they  are  as  stiff  a  task  as  Browning's: 
only  they  are  successful.  That  is  the  real 
strength  of  Swinburne — a  style.  It  was  a 
style  that  nobody  could  really  imitate;  and 
least  of  all  Swinburne  himself,  though  he 
made  the  attempt  all  through  his  later  years. 
He  was,  if  ever  there  was  one,  an  inspired 
poet.  I  do  not  think  it  the  highest  sort  of 
poet.  And  you  never  discover  who  is  an 
inspired  poet  until  the  inspiration  goes. 

With  Swinburne  we  step  into  the  circle  of 
that  later  Victorian  influence  which  was  very 
vaguely  called  ^Esthetic.  Like  all  human 
things,  but  especially  Victorian  things,  it  was 
not  only  complex  but  confused.  Things  in 


188    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

it  that  were  at  one  on  the  emotional  side  were 
flatly  at  war  on  the  intellectual.  In  the  sec- 
tion of  the  painters,  it  was  the  allies  or  pupils 
of  Ruskin,  pious,  almost  painfully  exact,  and 
copying  mediaeval  details  rather  for  their 
truth  than  their  beauty.  In  the  section  of  the 
poets  it  was  pretty  loose,  Swinburne  being  the 
leader  of  the  revels.  But  there  was  one  great 
man  who  was  in  both  sections,  a  painter  and  a 
poet,  who  may  be  said  to  bestride  the  chasm 
like  a  giant.  It  is  in  an  odd  and  literal  sense 
true  that  the  name  of  Rossetti  is  important 
here,  for  the  name  implies  the  nationality.  I 
have  loosely  called  Carlyle  and  the  Brontes 
the  romance  from  the  North ;  the  nearest  to  a 
general  definition  of  the  ^Esthetic  movement 
is  to  call  it  the  romance  from  the  South.  It 
is  that  warm  wind  that  had  never  blown  so 
strong  since  Chaucer,  standing  in  his  cold 
English  April,  had  smelt  the  spring  in 
Provence.  The  Englishman  has  always  found 
it  easier  to  get  inspiration  from  the  Italians 
than  from  the  French;  they  call  to  each  other 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    189 

across  that  unconquered  castle  of  reason. 
Browning's  Englishman  in  Italy,  Browning's 
Italian  in  England,  were  both  happier  than 
either  would  have  been  in  France.  Rossetti 
was  the  Italian  in  England,  as  Browning  was 
the  Englishman  in  Italy;  and  the  first  broad 
fact  about  the  artistic  revolution  Rossetti 
wrought  is  written  when  we  have  written  his 
name.  But  if  the  South  lets  in  warmth  or 
heat,  it  also  lets  in  hardness.  The  more  the 
orange  tree  is  luxuriant  in  growth,  the  less  it 
is  loose  in  outline.  And  it  is  exactly  where  the 
sea  is  slightly  warmer  than  marble  that  it 
looks  slightly  harder.  This,  I  think,  is  the 
one  universal  power  behind  the  ^Esthetic  and 
Pre-Raphaelite  movements,  which  all  agreed 
in  two  things  at  least:  strictness  in  the  line 
and  strength,  nay  violence,  in  the  colour. 

Rossetti  was  a  remarkable  man  in  more 
ways  than  one;  he  did  not  succeed  in  any  art; 
if  he  had  he  would  probably  never  have  been 
heard  of.  It  was  his  happy  knack  of  half 
failing  in  both  the  arts  that  has  made  him  a 


190    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

success.  If  he  had  been  as  good  a  poet  as 
Tennyson,  he  would  have  been  a  poet  who 
painted  pictures.  If  he  had  been  as  good  a 
painter  as  Burne-Jones,  he  would  have  been 
a  painter  who  wrote  poems.  It  is  odd  to  note 
on  the  very  threshold  of  the  extreme  art 
movement  that  this  great  artist  largely 
succeeded  by  not  defining  his  art.  His  poems 
were  too  pictorial.  His  pictures  were  too 
poetical.  That  is  why  they  really  conquered 
the  cold  satisfaction  of  the  Victorians,  be- 
cause they  did  mean  something,  even  if  it 
was  a  small  artistic  thing. 

Rossetti  was  one  with  Ruskin,  on  the  one 
hand,  and  Swinburne  on  the  other,  in  reviving 
the  decorative  instinct  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
While  Ruskin,  in  letters  only,  praised  that 
decoration  Rossetti  and  his  friends  repeated  it. 
They  almost  made  patterns  of  their  poems. 
That  frequent  return  of  the  refrain  which  was 
foolishly  discussed  by  Professor  Nordau  was, 
in  Rossetti's  case,  of  such  sadness  as  some- 
times to  amount  to  sameness.  The  criticism 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    191 

on  him,  from  a  mediaeval  point  of  view,  is  not 
that  he  insisted  on  a  chorus,  but  that  he  could 
not  insist  on  a  jolly  chorus.  Many  of  his 
poems  were  truly  mediaeval,  but  they  would 
have  been  even  more  mediaeval  if  he  could 
ever  have  written  such  a  refrain  as  "Tally 
Ho!"  or  even  "Tooral-ooral"  instead  of 
"Tall  Troy's  on  fire."  With  Rossetti  goes, 
of  course,  his  sister,  a  real  poet,  though  she 
also  illustrated  that  Pre-Raphaelite's  conflict 
of  views  that  covered  their  coincidence  of 
taste.  Both  used  the  angular  outlines,  the 
burning  transparencies,  the  fixed  but  still 
unfathomable  symbols  of  the  great  mediaeval 
civilisation;  but  Rossetti  used  the  religious 
imagery  (on  the  whole)  irreligiously,  Christina 
Rossetti  used  it  religiously  but  (on  the  whole) 
so  to  make  it  seem  a  narrower  religion. 

One  poet,  or,  to  speak  more  strictly,  one 
poem,  belongs  to  the  same  general  atmos- 
phere and  impulse  as  Swinburne;  the  free  but 
languid  atmosphere  of  later  Victorian  art. 
But  this  time  the  wind  blew  from  hotter  and 


192    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

heavier  gardens  than  the  gardens  of  Italy. 
Edward  Fitzgerald,  a  cultured  eccentric,  a 
friend  of  Tennyson,  produced  what  professed 
to  be  a  translation  of  the  Persian  poet  Omar, 
who  wrote  quatrains  about  wine  and  roses 
and  things  in  general.  Whether  the  Persian 
original,  in  its  own  Persian  way,  was  greater 
or  less  than  this  version  I  must  not  discuss 
here,  and  could  not  discuss  anywhere.  But  it 
is  quite  clear  that  Fitzgerald's  work  is  much 
too  good  to  be  a  good  translation.  It  is  as 
personal  and  creative  a  thing  as  ever  was 
written;  and  the  best  expression  of  a  bad 
mood,  a  mood  that  may,  for  all  I  know,  be 
permanent  in  Persia,  but  was  certainly  at 
this  time  particularly  fashionable  in  England. 
In  the  technical  sense  of  literature  it  is  one  of 
the  most  remarkable  achievements  of  that 
age;  as  poetical  as  Swinburne  and  far  more 
perfect.  In  this  verbal  sense  its  most  arresting 
quality  is  a  combination  of  something  haunt- 
ing and  harmonious  that  flows  by  like  a  river 
or  a  song,  with  something  else  that  is  compact 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    193 

and  pregnant  like  a  pithy  saying  picked  out 
in  rock  by  the  chisel  of  some  pagan  philoso- 
pher. It  is  at  once  a  tune  that  escapes  and 
an  inscription  that  remains.  Thus,  alone 
among  the  reckless  and  romantic  verses  that 
first  rose  in  Coleridge  or  Keats,  it  preserves 
something  also  of  the  wit  and  civilisation  of 
the  eighteenth  century.  Lines  like  "  a  Muez- 
zin from  the  tower  of  darkness  cries,"  or 
"Then*  mouths  are  stopped  with  dust"  are 
successful  in  the  same  sense  as  "Pinnacled 
dim  in  the  intense  inane"  or  "Through 
verdurous  glooms  and  winding  mossy  ways." 
But- 

*' Indeed,  indeed,  repentance  oft  before 

!  I  swore;  but  was  I  sober  when  I  swore?" 

is  equally  successful  in  the  same  sense  as — 

"Damn  with  faint  praise,  assent  with  civil 

leer 

And  without  sneering  teach  the  rest  to 
sneer." 


194    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

It  thus  earned  a  right  to  be  considered  the 
complete  expression  of  that  scepticism  and 
sensual  sadness  into  which  later  Victorian 
literature  was  more  and  more  falling  away: 
a  sort  of  bible  of  unbelief.  For  a  cold  fit  had 
followed  the  hot  fit  of  Swinburne,  which  was 
of  a  feverish  sort:  he  had  set  out  to  break 
down  without  having,  or  even  thinking  he 
had,  the  rudiments  of  rebuilding  in  him; 
and  he  effected  nothing  national  even  in 
the  way  of  destruction.  The  Tennysonians 
still  walked  past  him  as  primly  as  a  young 
ladies'  school — the  Browningites  still  inked 
their  eyebrows  and  minds  in  looking  for  the 
lost  syntax  of  Browning;  while  Browning 
himself  was  away  looking  for  God,  rather 
in  the  spirit  of  a  truant  boy  from  their 
school  looking  for  birds'  nests.  The  nine- 
teenth-century sceptics  did  not  really  shake 
the  respectable  world  and  alter  it,  as  the 
eighteenth-century  sceptics  had  done;  but 
that  was  because  the  eighteenth-century 
sceptics  were  something  more  than  sceptics, 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    195 

and  believed  in  Greek  tragedies,  in  Roman 
laws,  in  the  Republic.  The  Swinburnian 
sceptics  had  nothing  to  fight  for  but  a  frame 
of  mind;  and  when  ordinary  English  people 
listened  to  it,  they  came  to  the  conclusion 
that  it  was  a  frame  of  mind  they  would  rather 
hear  about  than  experience.  But  these  later 
poets  did,  so  to  speak,  spread  their  soul  in 
all  the  empty  spaces;  weaker  brethren,  dis- 
appointed artists,  unattached  individuals, 
very  young  people,  were  sapped  or  swept 
away  by  these  songs;  which,  so  far  as  any 
particular  sense  in  them  goes,  were  almost 
songs  without  words.  It  is  because  there  is 
something  which  is  after  all  indescribably 
manly,  intellectual,  firm  about  Fitzgerald's 
way  of  phrasing  the  pessimism  that  he  towers 
above  the  slope  that  was  tumbling  down  to 
the  decadents.  But  it  is  still  pessimism,  a 
thing  unfit  for  a  white  man;  a  thing  like 
opium,  that  may  often  be  a  poison  and  some- 
times a  medicine,  but  never  a  food  for  us, 
who  are  driven  by  an  inner  command  not 


196    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

only  to  think  but  to  live,  not  only  to  live 
but  to  grow,  and  not  only  to  grow  but  to 
build. 

And,  indeed,  we  see  the  insufficiency  of 
such  sad  extremes  even  in  the  next  name 
among  the  major  poets;  we  see  the  Swin- 
burnian  parody  of  medisevalism,  the  inverted 
Catholicism  of  the  decadents,  struggling  to 
get  back  somehow  on  its  feet.  The  aesthetic 
school  had,  not  quite  unjustly,  the  name  of 
mere  dilettanti.  But  it  is  fair  to  say  that  in 
the  next  of  them,  a  workman  and  a  tradesman, 
we  already  feel  something  of  that  return  to 
real  issues  leading  up  to  the  real  revolts  that 
broke  up  Victorianism  at  last.  In  the  mere 
art  of  words,  indeed,  William  Morris  carried 
much  further  than  Swinburne  or  Rossetti 
the  mere  imitation  of  stiff  mediaeval  orna- 
ment. The  other  medisevalists  had  their 
modern  moments;  which  were  (  if  they  had 
only  known  it)  much  more  mediaeval  than 
their  mediaeval  moments.  Swinburne  could 
write — 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    197 

"We  shall  see  Buonaparte  the  bastard 
Kick  heels  with  his  throat  in  a  rope." 

One  has  an  uneasy  feeling  that  William  Morris 
would  have  written  something  like — 

"And  the  kin  of  the  ill  king  Bonaparte 
Hath  a  high  gallows  for  all  his  part." 

Rossetti  could,  for  once  in  a  way,  write  poetry 
about  a  real  woman  and  call  her  "Jenny." 
One  has  a  disturbed  suspicion  that  Morris 
would  have  called  her  "  Jehanne." 

But  all  that  seems  at  first  more  archaic  and 
decorative  about  Morris  really  arose  from  the 
fact  that  he  was  more  virile  and  real  than 
either  Swinburne  or  Rossetti.  It  arose  from 
the  fact  that  he  really  was,  what  he  so  often 
called  himself,  a  craftsman.  He  had  enough 
masculine  strength  to  be  tidy:  that  is,  after 
the  masculine  manner,  tidy  about  his  own 
trade.  If  his  poems  were  too  like  wallpapers, 
it  was  because  he  really  could  make  wall- 


198    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

papers.  He  knew  that  lines  of  poetry  ought 
to  be  in  a  row,  as  palings  ought  to  be  in  a  row; 
and  he  knew  that  neither  palings  nor  poetry 
looks  any  the  worse  for  being  simple  or  even 
severe.  In  a  sense  Morris  was  all  the  more 
creative  because  he  felt  the  hard  limits  of 
creation  as  he  would  have  felt  them  if  he  were 
not  working  in  words  but  in  wood;  and  if  he 
was  unduly  dominated  by  the  mere  conven- 
tions of  the  medisevals,  it  was  largely  because 
they  were  (whatever  else  they  were)  the  very 
finest  fraternity  of  free  workmen  the  world  is 
ever  likely  to  see. 

The  very  things  that  were  urged  against 
Morris  are  in  this  sense  part  of  his  ethical 
importance;  part  of  the  more  promising  and 
wholesome  turn  he  was  hah*  unconsciously 
giving  to  the  movement  of  modern  art.  His 
hazier  fellow-Socialists  blamed  him  because 
he  made  money;  but  this  was  at  least  in  some 
degree  because  he  made  other  things  to  make 
money:  it  was  part  of  the  real  and  refreshing 
fact  that  at  last  an  aesthete  had  appeared  who 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    199 

could  make  something.  If  he  was  a  capitalist, 
at  least  he  was  what  later  capitalists  cannot  or 
will  not  be — something  higher  than  a  capital- 
ist, a  tradesman.  As  compared  with  aristo- 
crats like  Swinburne  or  aliens  like  Rossetti, 
he  was  vitally  English  and  vitally  Victorian. 
He  inherits  some  of  that  paradoxical  glory 
which  Napoleon  gave  reluctantly  to  a  nation 
of  shopkeepers.  He  was  the  last  of  that 
nation;  he  did  not  go  out  golfing:  like  that 
founder  of  the  artistic  shopman,  Samuel 
Richardson,  "he  kept  his  shop,  and  his  shop 
kept  him."  The  importance  of  his  Socialism 
can  easily  be  exaggerated.  Among  other 
lesser  points,  he  was  not  a  Socialist;  he  was 
a  sort  of  Dickensian  anarchist.  His  instinct 
for  titles  was  always  exquisite.  It  is  part  of 
his  instinct  of  decoration:  for  on  a  page  the 
title  always  looks  important  and  the  printed 
mass  of  matter  a  mere  dado  under  it.  And 
no  one  had  ever  nobler  titles  than  The  Roots 
of  the  Mountains  or  The  Wood  at  the  End  of  the 
World.  The  reader  feels  he  hardly  need  read 


200    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

the  fairy-tale  because  the  title  is  so  suggestive. 
But,  when  all  is  said,  he  never  chose  a  better 
title  than  that  of  his  social  Utopia,  News 
from  Nowhere.  He  wrote  it  while  the  last 
Victorians  were  already  embarked  on  their 
bold  task  of  fixing  the  future — of  narrating 
to-day  what  has  happened  to-morrow.  They 
named  their  books  by  cold  titles  suggesting 
straight  corridors  of  marble — titles  like 
Looking  Backward.  But  Morris  was  an 
artist  as  well  as  an  anarchist.  News  from 
Nowhere  is  an  irresponsible  title;  and  it  is  an 
irresponsible  book.  It  does  not  describe  the 
problem  solved;  it  does  not  describe  wealth 
either  wielded  by  the  State  or  divided  equally 
among  the  citizens.  It  simply  describes  an 
undiscovered  country  where  every  one  feels 
good-natured  all  day.  That  he  could  even 
dream  so  is  his  true  dignity  as  a  poet.  He  was 
the  first  of  the  Esthetes  to  smell  medievalism 
as  a  smell  of  the  morning;  and  not  as  a  mere 
scent  of  decay. 

With  him  the  poetry  that  had  been  pecul- 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS    201 

iarly  Victorian  practically  ends;  and,  on  the 
whole,  it  is  a  happy  ending.  There  are  many 
other  minor  names  of  major  importance;  but 
for  one  reason  or  other  they  do  not  derive 
from  the  schools  that  had  dominated  this 
epoch  as  such.  Thus  Thompson,  the  author 
of  The  City  of  Dreadful  Night,  was  a  fine  poet; 
but  his  pessimism  combined  with  a  close 
pugnacity  does  not  follow  any  of  the  large 
but  loose  lines  of  the  Swinburnian  age.  But 
he  was  a  great  person — he  knew  how  to  be 
democratic  in  the  dark.  Thus  Coventry  Pat- 
more  was  a  much  greater  person.  He  was 
bursting  with  ideas,  like  Browning — and  truer 
ideas  as  a  rule.  He  was  as  eccentric  and  florid 
and  Elizabethan  as  Browning;  and  often  in 
moods  and  metres  that  even  Browning  was 
never  wild  enough  to  think  of.  No  one  will 
ever  forget  the  first  time  he  read  Patmore's 
hint  that  the  cosmos  is  a  thing  that  God  made 
huge  only  "to  make  dirt  cheap";  just  as 
nobody  will  ever  forget  the  sudden  shout  he 
uttered  when  he  first  heard  Mrs.  Todgers 


202    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

asked  for  the  rough  outline  of  a  wooden  leg. 
These  things  are  not  jokes,  but  discoveries. 
But  the  very  fact  that  Patmore  was,  as  it 
were,  the  Catholic  Browning,  keeps  him  out 
of  the  Victorian  atmosphere  as  such.  The 
Victorian  English  simply  thought  him  an 
indecent  sentimentalist,  as  they  did  all  the 
hot  and  humble  religious  diarists  of  Italy  or 
Spain.  Something  of  the  same  fate  followed 
the  most  powerful  of  that  last  Victorian 
group  who  were  called  "  Minor  Poets."  They 
numbered  many  other  fine  artists:  notably 
Mr.  William  Watson,  who  is  truly  Victorian 
in  that  he  made  a  manly  attempt  to  tread 
down  the  decadents  and  return  to  the  right 
reason  of  Wordsworth — 

"I  have  not  paid  the  world 
The  evil  and  the  insolent  courtesy 
Of  offering  it  my  baseness  as  a  gift." 

But  none  of  them  were  able  even  to  under- 
stand Francis  Thompson;  his  sky-scraping 


THE  GREAT  VICTORIAN  POETS  203 

humility,  his  mountains  of  mystical  detail, 
his  occasional  and  unashamed  weakness,  his 
sudden  and  sacred  blasphemies.  Perhaps  the 
shortest  definition  of  the  Victorian  Age  is  that 
he  stood  outside  it. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE 

IF  it  be  curiously  and  carefully  considered 
it  will,  I  think,  appear  more  and  more  true 
that  the  struggle  between  the  old  spiritual 
theory  and  the  new  material  theory  in  Eng- 
land ended  simply  in  a  deadlock;  and  a  dead- 
lock that  has  endured.  It  is  still  impossible  to 
say  absolutely  that  England  is  a  Christian 
country  or  a  heathen  country;  almost  exactly 
as  it  was  impossible  when  Herbert  Spencer 
began  to  write.  Separate  elements  of  both 
sorts  are  alive,  and  even  increasingly  alive. 
But  neither  the  believer  nor  the  unbeliever 
has  the  impudence  to  call  himself  the  English- 
man. Certainly  the  great  Victorian  rational- 
ism has  succeeded  in  doing  a  damage  to 
religion.  It  has  done  what  is  perhaps  the 
worst  of  all  damages  to  religion.  It  has 

204 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    205 

driven  it  entirely  into  the  power  of  the  relig- 
ious people.  Men  like  Newman,  men  like 
Coventry  Patmore,  men  who  would  have  been 
mystics  in  any  case,  were  driven  back  upon 
being  much  more  extravagantly  religious 
than  they  would  have  been  in  a  religious 
country.  Men  like  Huxley,  men  like  Kings- 
ley,  men  like  most  Victorian  men,  were 
equally  driven  back  on  being  irreligious; 
that  is,  on  doubting  things  which  men's 
normal  imagination  does  not  necessarily 
doubt.  But  certainly  the  most  final  and 
forcible  fact  is  that  this  war  ended  like  the 
battle  of  Sheriffmuir,  as  the  poet  says; 
they  both  did  fight,  and  both  did  beat,  and 
both  did  run  away.  They  have  left  to  their 
descendants  a  treaty  that  has  become  a  dull 
torture.  Men  may  believe  in  immortality, 
and  none  of  the  men  know  why.  Men  may 
not  believe  in  miracles,  and  none  of  the  men 
know  why.  The  Christian  Church  had  been 
just  strong  enough  to  check  the  conquest  of 
her  chief  citadels.  The  rationalist  movement 


206    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

had  been  just  strong  enough  to  conquer  some 
of  her  outposts,  as  it  seemed,  for  ever.  Nei- 
ther was  strong  enough  to  expel  the  other; 
and  Victorian  England  was  in  a  state  which 
some  call  liberty  and  some  call  lockjaw. 

But  the  situation  can  be  stated  another 
way.  There  came  a  tune,  roughly  somewhere 
about  1880,  when  the  two  great  positive 
enthusiasms  of  Western  Europe  had  for  the 
time  exhausted  each  other — Christianity  and 
the  French  Revolution.  About  that  time 
there  used  to  be  a  sad  and  not  unsympathetic 
jest  going  about  to  the  effect  that  Queen 
Victoria  might  very  well  live  longer  than  the 
Prince  of  Wales.  Somewhat  in  the  same  way, 
though  the  republican  impulse  was  hardly  a 
hundred  years  old  and  the  religious  impulse 
nearly  two  thousand,  yet  as  far  as  England 
was  concerned,  the  old  wave  and  the  new 
seemed  to  be  spent  at  the  same  time.  On  the 
one  hand  Darwin,  especially  through  the 
strong  journalistic  genius  of  Huxley,  had  won 
a  very  wide  spread  though  an  exceedingly 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    207 

vague  victory.  I  do  not  mean  that  Darwin's 
own  doctrine  was  vague;  his  was  merely  one 
particular  hypothesis  about  how  animal 
variety  might  have  arisen;  and  that  par- 
ticular hypothesis,  though  it  will  always  be 
interesting,  is  now  very  much  the  reverse 
of  secure.  But  it  is  only  in  the  strictly 
scientific  world  and  among  strictly  scientific 
men  that  Darwin's  detailed  suggestion  has 
largely  broken  down.  The  general  public 
impression  that  he  had  entirely  proved  his 
case  (whatever  it  was)  was  early  arrived  at, 
and  still  remains.  It  was  and  is  hazily 
associated  with  the  negation  of  religion. 
But  (and  this  is  the  important  point)  it  was 
also  associated  with  the  negation  of  democ- 
racy. The  same  Mid- Victorian  muddle- 
headedness  that  made  people  think  that 
"evolution"  meant  that  we  need  not  admit 
the  supremacy  of  God,  also  made  them  think 
that  "survival"  meant  that  we  must  admit 
the  supremacy  of  men.  Huxley  had  no  hand 
in  spreading  these  fallacies;  he  was  a  fair 


208    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

fighter;  and  he  told  his  own  followers,  who 
spoke  thus,  most  emphatically  not  to  play  the 
fool.  He  said  most  strongly  that  his  or  any 
theory  of  evolution  left  the  old  philosophical 
arguments  for  a  creator,  right  or  wrong, 
exactly  where  they  were  before.  He  also  said 
most  emphatically  that  any  one  who  used  the 
argument  of  Nature  against  the  ideal  of  jus- 
tice or  an  equal  law,  was  as  senseless  as  a 
gardener  who  should  fight  on  the  side  of  the 
ill  weeds  merely  because  they  grew  apace.  I 
wish,  indeed,  that  in  such  a  rude  summary  as 
this,  I  had  space  to  do  justice  to  Huxley  as  a 
literary  man  and  a  moralist.  He  had  a  live 
taste  and  talent  for  the  English  tongue,  which 
he  devoted  to  the  task  of  keeping  Victorian 
rationalism  rational.  He  did  not  succeed. 
As  so  often  happens  when  a  rather  unhealthy 
doubt  is  in  the  atmosphere,  the  strongest 
words  of  their  great  captain  could  not  keep 
the  growing  crowds  of  agnostics  back  from 
the  most  hopeless  and  inhuman  extremes  of 
destructive  thought.  Nonsense  not  yet  quite 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    209 

dead  about  the  folly  of  allowing  the  unfit  to 
survive  began  to  be  more  and  more  wildly 
whispered.  Such  helpless  specimens  of  "ad- 
vanced thought"  are,  of  course,  quite  as 
inconsistent  with  Darwinism  as  they  are  with 
democracy  or  with  any  other  intelligent 
proposition  ever  offered.  But  these  unintel- 
ligent propositions  were  offered;  and  the 
ultimate  result  was  this  rather  important  one: 
that  the  harshness  of  Utilitarianism  began  to 
turn  into  downright  tyranny.  That  beauti- 
ful faith  in  human  nature  and  in  freedom 
which  had  made  delicate  the  dry  air  of  John 
Stuart  Mill;  that  robust,  romantic  sense  of 
justice  which  had  redeemed  even  the  injus- 
tices of  Macaulay — all  that  seemed  slowly  and 
sadly  to  be  drying  up.  Under  the  shock  of 
Darwinism  all  that  was  good  in  the  Victorian 
rationalism  shook  and  dissolved  like  dust. 
All  that  was  bad  in  it  abode  and  clung  like 
clay.  The  magnificent  emancipation  evapo- 
rated; the  mean  calculation  remained.  One 
could  still  calculate  in  clear  statistical  tables, 


210    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

how  many  men  lived,  how  many  men  died. 
One  must  not  ask  how  they  lived;  for  that  is 
politics.  One  must  not  ask  how  they  died; 
for  that  is  religion.  And  religion  and  politics 
were  ruled  out  of  all  the  Later  Victorian  de- 
bating clubs;  even  including  the  debating 
club  at  Westminster.  What  third  thing 
they  were  discussing,  which  was  neither 
religion  nor  politics,  I  do  not  know.  I  have 
tried  the  experiment  of  reading  solidly 
through  a  vast  number  of  their  records  and 
reviews  and  discussions;  and  still  I  do  not 
know.  The  only  third  thing  I  can  think  of 
to  balance  religion  and  politics  is  art;  and 
no  one  well  acquainted  with  the  debates  at 
St.  Stephen's  will  imagine  that  the  art  of 
extreme  eloquence  was  the  cause  of  the  con- 
fusion. None  will  maintain  that  our  political 
masters  are  removed  from  us  by  an  infinite 
artistic  superiority  in  the  choice  of  words. 
The  politicians  know  nothing  of  politics, 
which  is  their  own  affair:  they  know  nothing 
of  religion,  which  is  certainly  not  their 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    211 

affair:  it  may  legitimately  be  said  that  they 
have  to  do  with  nothing;  they  have  reached 
that  low  and  last  level  where  a  man  knows  as 
little  about  his  own  claim,  as  he  does  about 
his  enemies'.  In  any  case  there  can  be  no 
doubt  about  the  effect  of  this  particular 
situation  on  the  problem  of  ethics  and  science. 
The  duty  of  dragging  truth  out  by  the  tail 
or  the  hind  leg  or  any  other  corner  one  can 
possibly  get  hold  of,  a  perfectly  sound  duty  in 
itself,  had  somehow  come  into  collision  with 
the  older  and  larger  duty  of  knowing  some- 
thing about  the  organism  and  ends  of  a 
creature;  or,  in  the  everyday  phrase,  being 
able  to  make  head  or  tail  of  it.  This  paradox 
pursued  and  tormented  the  Victorians.  They 
could  not  or  would  not  see  that  humanity 
repels  or  welcomes  the  railway-train,  simply 
according  to  what  people  come  by  it.  They 
could  not  see  that  one  welcomes  or  smashes 
the  telephone,  according  to  what  words  one 
hears  in  it.  They  really  seem  to  have  felt 
that  the  train  could  be  a  substitute  for  its 


VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

own  passengers;  or  the  telephone  a  substitute 
for  its  own  voice. 

In  any  case  it  is  clear  that  a  change  had 
begun  to  pass  over  scientific  inquiry,  of  which 
we  have  seen  the  culmination  in  our  own  day. 
There  had  begun  that  easy  automatic  habit, 
of  science  as  an  oiled  and  smooth-running 
machine,  that  habit  of  treating  things  as 
obviously  unquestionable,  when,  indeed,  they 
are  obviously  questionable.  This  began  with 
vaccination  in  the  Early  Victorian  Age;  it 
extended  to  the  early  licence  of  vivisection 
in  its  later  age;  it  has  found  a  sort  of  fitting 
foolscap,  or  crown  of  crime  and  folly,  in  the 
thing  called  Eugenics.  In  all  three  cases  the 
point  was  not  so  much  that  the  pioneers  had 
not  proved  their  case;  it  was  rather  that,  by 
an  unexpressed  rule  of  respectability,  they 
were  not  required  to  prove  it.  This  rather 
abrupt  twist  of  the  rationalistic  mind  in  the 
direction  of  arbitrary  power,  certainly  weak- 
ened the  Liberal  movement  from  within. 
And  meanwhile  it  was  being  weakened  by 
heavy  blows  from  without. 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    213 

There  is  a  week  that  is  the  turn  of  the  year; 
there  was  a  year  that  was  the  turn  of  the 
century.  About  1870  the  force  of  the  French 
Revolution  faltered  and  fell:  the  year  that 
was  everywhere  the  death  of  Liberal  ideas: 
the  year  when  Paris  fell:  the  year  when  Dick- 
ens died.  While  the  new  foes  of  freedom,  the 
sceptics  and  scientists,  were  damaging  democ- 
racy in  ideas,  the  old  foes  of  freedom,  the 
emperors  and  the  kings,  were  damaging  her 
more  heavily  in  arms.  For  a  moment  it 
almost  seemed  that  the  old  Tory  ring  of  iron, 
the  Holy  Alliance,  had  recombined  against 
France.  But  there  was  just  this  difference: 
that  the  Holy  Alliance  was  now  not  arguably, 
but  almost  avowedly,  an  Unholy  Alliance. 
It  was  an  alliance  between  those  who  still 
thought  they  could  deny  the  dignity  of  man 
and  those  who  had  recently  begun  to  have  a 
bright  hope  of  denying  even  the  dignity  of 
God.  Eighteenth-century  Prussia  was  Prot- 
estant and  probably  religious.  Nineteenth- 
century  Prussia  was  almost  utterly  atheist. 


214    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

Thus  the  old  spirit  of  liberty  felt  itself  shut 
up  at  both  ends,  that  which  was  called  pro- 
gressive and  that  which  was  called  reaction- 
ary: barricaded  by  Bismarck  with  blood  and 
iron  and  by  Darwin  by  blood  and  bones. 
The  enormous  depression  which  infects  many 
excellent  people  born  about  this  time,  prob- 
ably has  this  cause. 

It  was  a  great  calamity  that  the  freedom  of 
Wilkes  and  the  faith  of  Dr.  Johnson  fought 
each  other.  But  it  was  an  even  worse 
calamity  that  they  practically  killed  each 
other.  They  killed  each  other  almost  simul- 
taneously, like  Herminius  and  Mamilius. 
Liberalism  (in  Newman's  sense)  really  did 
strike  Christianity  through  headpiece  and 
through  head;  that  is,  it  did  daze  and  stun 
the  ignorant  and  ill-prepared  intellect  of 
the  English  Christian.  And  Christianity  did 
srnite  Liberalism  through  breastplate  and 
through  breast;  that  is,  it  did  succeed, 
through  arms  and  all  sorts  of  awful  accidents, 
in  piercing  more  or  less  to  the  heart  of  the 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    215 

Utilitarian — and  finding  that  he  had  none. 
Victorian  Protestantism  had  not  head  enough 
for  the  business;  Victorian  Radicalism  had 
not  heart  enough  for  the  business.  Down  fell 
they  dead  together,  exactly  as  Macaulay's 
Lay  says,  and  still  stood  all  who  saw  them 
fall  almost  until  the  hour  at  which  I  write. 

This  coincident  collapse  of  both  religious 
and  political  idealism  produced  a  curious  cold 
air  of  emptiness  and  real  subconscious  agnos- 
ticism such  as  is  extremely  unusual  in  the 
history  of  mankind.  It  is  what  Mr.  Wells, 
with  his  usual  verbal  delicacy  and  accuracy, 
spoke  of  as  that  ironical  silence  that  follows 
a  great  controversy.  It  is  what  people  less 
intelligent  than  Mr.  Wells  meant  by  calling 
themselves  fin  de  siecle;  though,  of  course, 
rationally  speaking,  there  is  no  more  reason 
for  being  sad  towards  the  end  of  a  hundred 
years  than  towards  the  end  of  five  hundred 
fortnights.  There  was  no  arithmetical  au- 
tumn, but  there  was  a  spiritual  one.  And  it 
came  from  the  fact  suggested  in  the  para- 


216    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

graphs  above;  the  sense  that  man's  two  great 
inspirations  had  failed  him  together.  The 
Christian  religion  was  much  more  dead  in  the 
eighteenth  century  than  it  was  in  the  nine- 
teenth century.  But  the  republican  enthusi- 
asm was  also  much  more  alive.  If  their 
scepticism  was  cold,  and  their  faith  even 
colder,  their  practical  politics  were  wildly 
idealistic;  and  if  they  doubted  the  kingdom 
of  heaven,  they  were  gloriously  credulous 
about  the  chances  of  it  coming  on  earth. 
In  the  same  way  the  old  pagan  republican 
feeling  was  much  more  dead  in  the  feudal 
darkness  of  the  eleventh  or  twelfth  centuries, 
than  it  was  even  a  century  later;  but  if  crea- 
tive politics  were  at  their  lowest,  creative 
theology  was  almost  at  its  highest  point  of 
energy. 

The  modern  world,  in  fact,  had  fallen 
between  two  stools.  It  had  fallen  between 
that  austere  old  three-legged  stool  which  was 
the  tripod  of  the  cold  priestess  of  Apollo; 
and  that  other  mystical  and  mediaeval  stool 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    217 

that  may  well  be  called  the  Stool  of  Repent- 
ance. It  kept  neither  of  the  two  values  as 
intensely  valuable.  It  could  not  believe  in 
the  bonds  that  bound  men;  but,  then,  neither 
could  it  believe  in  the  men  they  bound.  It 
was  always  restrained  in  its  hatred  of  slavery 
by  a  half  remembrance  of  its  yet  greater 
hatred  of  liberty.  They  were  almost  alone, 
I  think,  hi  thus  carrying  to  its  extreme  the 
negative  attitude  already  noted  hi  Miss 
Arabella  Allen.  Anselm  would  have  despised 
a  civic  crown,  but  he  would  not  have  despised 
a  relic.  Voltaire  would  have  despised  a  relic; 
but  he  would  not  have  despised  a  vote.  We 
hardly  find  them  both  despised  till  we  come  to 
the  age  of  Oscar  Wilde. 

These  years  that  followed  on  that  double 
disillusionment  were  like  one  long  afternoon 
in  a  rich  house  on  a  rainy  day.  It  was  not 
merely  that  everybody  believed  that  nothing 
would  happen;  it  was  also  that  everybody 
believed  that  anything  happening  was  even 
duller  than  nothing  happening.  It  was  in 


218    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

this  stale  atmosphere  that  a  few  flickers  of 
the  old  Swinburnian  flame  survived;  and  were 
called  Art.  The  great  men  of  the  older 
artistic  movement  did  not  live  in  this  time; 
rather  they  lived  through  it.  But  this  time 
did  produce  an  interregnum  of  art  that  had 
a  truth  of  its  own;  though  that  truth  was 
near  to  being  only  a  consistent  lie. 

The  movement  of  those  called  ^Esthetes  (as 
satirised  in  Patience)  and  the  movement  of 
those  afterwards  called  Decadents  (satirised 
in  Mr.  Street's  delightful  Autobiography  of  a 
Boy)  had  the  same  captain;  or  at  any  rate 
the  same  bandmaster.  Oscar  Wilde  walked 
in  front  of  the  first  procession  wearing  a  sun- 
flower, and  in  front  of  the  second  procession 
wearing  a  green  carnation.  With  the  aesthetic 
movement  and  its  more  serious  elements,  I 
deal  elsewhere;  but  the  second  appearance  of 
Wilde  is  also  connected  with  real  intellectual 
influences,  largely  negative,  indeed,  but  subtle 
and  influential.  The  mark  in  most  of  the 
arts  of  this  time  was  a  certain  quality  which 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    219 

those  who  like  it  would  call  "uniqueness  of 
aspect,"  and  those  who  do  not  like  it  "not 
quite  coming  off."  I  mean  the  thing  meant 
something  from  one  standpoint;  but  its 
mark  was  that  the  smallest  change  of  stand- 
point made  it  unmeaning  and  unthinkable 
— a  foolish  joke.  A  beggar  painted  by  Rem- 
brandt is  as  solid  as  a  statue,  however  roughly 
he  is  sketched  in;  the  soul  can  walk  all  round 
him  like  a  public  monument.  We  see  he 
would  have  other  aspects;  and  that  they 
would  all  be  the  aspects  of  a  beggar.  Even 
if  one  did  not  admit  the  extraordinary 
qualities  in  the  painting,  one  would  have  to 
admit  the  ordinary  qualities  in  the  sitter.  If 
it  is  not  a  masterpiece  it  is  a  man.  But  a 
nocturne  by  Whistler  of  mist  on  the  Thames 
is  either  a  masterpiece  or  it  is  nothing; 
it  is  either  a  nocturne  or  a  nightmare  of 
childish  nonsense.  Made  in  a  certain  mood, 
viewed  through  a  certain  temperament,  con- 
ceived under  certain  conventions,  it  may  be, 
it  often  is,  an  unreplaceable  poem,  a  vision 


220    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

that  may  never  be  seen  again.  But  the 
moment  it  ceases  to  be  a  splendid  picture  it 
ceases  to  be  a  picture  at  all.  Or,  again,  if 
Hamlet  is  not  a  great  tragedy  it  is  an  un- 
commonly good  tale.  The  people  and  the 
posture  of  affairs  would  still  be  there  even 
if  one  thought  that  Shakespeare's  moral  atti- 
tude was  wrong.  Just  as  one  could  imagine 
all  the  other  sides  of  Rembrandt's  beggar,  so, 
with  the  mind's  eye  (Horatio),  one  can  see 
all  four  sides  of  the  castle  of  Elsinore.  One 
might  tell  the  tale  from  the  point  of  view  of 
Laertes  or  Claudius  or  Polonius  or  the  grave- 
digger;  and  it  would  still  be  a  good  tale  and 
the  same  tale.  But  if  we  take  a  play  like 
PelUas  and  Melisande,  we  shall  find  that  un- 
less we  grasp  the  particular  fairy  thread  of 
thought  the  poet  rather  hazily  flings  to  us, 
we  cannot  grasp  anything  whatever.  Except 
from  one  extreme  poetic  point  of  view,  the 
thing  is  not  a  play;  it  is  not  a  bad  play,  it  is 
a  mass  of  clotted  nonsense.  One  whole  act 
describes  the  lovers  going  to  look  for  a  ring  in 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    221 

a  distant  cave  when  they  both  know  they 
have  dropped  it  down  a  well.  Seen  from 
some  secret  window  on  some  special  side  of 
the  soul's  turret,  this  might  convey  a  sense  of 
faerie  futility  in  our  human  life.  But  it  is 
quite  obvious  that  unless  it  called  forth  that 
one  kind  of  sympathy,  it  would  call  forth 
nothing  but  laughter  and  rotten  eggs.  In 
the  same  play  the  husband  chases  his  wife 
with  a  drawn  sword,  the  wife  remarking  at 
intervals  "I  am  not  gay.*'  Now  there  may 
really  be  an  idea  in  this;  the  idea  of  human 
misfortune  coming  most  cruelly  upon  the 
optimism  of  innocence;  that  the  lonely 
human  heart  says,  like  a  child  at  a  party, 
"I  am  not  enjoying  myself  as  I  thought  I 
should."  But  it  is  plain  that  unless  one 
thinks  of  this  idea  (and  of  this  idea  only)  the 
expression  is  not  in  the  least  unsuccessful 
pathos;  it  is  very  broad  and  highly  successful 
farce.  Maeterlinck  and  the  decadents,  in 
short,  may  fairly  boast  of  being  subtle;  but 
they  must  not  mind  if  they  are  called  narrow. 


222    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

This  is  the  spirit  of  Wilde's  work  and  of  most 
of  the  literary  work  done  in  that  time  and 
fashion.  It  is,  as  Mr.  Arthur  Symons  said, 
an  attitude;  but  it  is  an  attitude  in  the  flat, 
not  in  the  round;  not  a  statue,  but  the  card- 
board king  in  a  toy-theatre,  which  can  only 
be  looked  at  from  the  front.  In  Wilde's  own 
poetry  we  have  particularly  a  perpetually 
toppling  possibility  of  the  absurd;  a  sense  of 
just  falling  too  short  or  just  going  too  far. 
"Plant  lilies  at  my  head"  has  something 
wrong  about  it;  something  silly  that  is  not 
there  in — 

"And  put  a  grey  stone  at  my  head" 

in  the  old  ballad.  But  even  where  Wilde 
was  right,  he  had  a  way  of  being  right  with 
this  excessive  strain  on  the  reader's  sympathy 
(and  gravity)  which  was  the  mark  of  all  these 
men  with  a  "point  of  view."  There  is  a  very 
sound  sonnet  of  his  in  which  he  begins  by 
lamenting  mere  anarchy,  as  hostile  to  the  art 
and  civilisation  that  were  his  only  gods;  but 
ends  by  saying — 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    223 

"And  yet 

These  Christs  that  die  upon  the  barricades 
God  knows  that  I  am  with  them — in  some 
ways." 

Now  that  is  really  very  true;  that  is  the  way 
a  man  of  wide  reading  and  worldly  experience, 
but  not  ungenerous  impulses,  does  feel  about 
the  mere  fanatic,  who  is  at  once  a  nuisance  to 
humanity  and  an  honour  to  human  nature. 
Yet  who  can  read  that  last  line  without  feeling 
that  Wilde  is  poised  on  the  edge  of  a  precipice 
of  bathos;  that  the  phrase  comes  very  near 
to  being  quite  startlingly  silly.  It  is  as  in 
the  case  of  Maeterlinck,  let  the  reader  move 
his  standpoint  one  inch  nearer  the  popular 
standpoint,  and  there  is  nothing  for  the  thing 
but  harsh,  hostile,  unconquerable  mirth. 
Somehow  the  image  of  Wilde  lolling  like 
an  elegant  leviathan  on  a  sofa,  and  saying 
between  the  whiffs  of  a  scented  cigarette  that 
martyrdom  is  martyrdom  in  some  respects, 
has  seized  on  and  mastered  all  more  delicate 


224    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

considerations  in  the  mind.    It  is  unwise  in 
a  poet  to  goad  the  sleeping  lion  of  laughter. 

In  less  dexterous  hands  the  decadent  idea, 
what  there  was  of  it,  went  entirely  to  pieces, 
which  nobody  has  troubled  to  pick  up. 
Oddly  enough  (unless  this  be  always  the 
Nemesis  of  excess)  it  began  to  be  insupport- 
able in  the  very  ways  in  which  it  claimed 
specially  to  be  subtle  and  tactful;  in  the  feel- 
ing for  different  art-forms,  in  the  welding  of 
subject  and  style,  in  the  appropriateness  of 
the  epithet  and  the  unity  of  the  mood.  Wilde 
himself  wrote  some  things  that  were  not 
immorality,  but  merely  bad  taste;  not  the 
bad  taste  of  the  conservative  suburbs,  which 
merely  means  anything  violent  or  shocking, 
but  real  bad  taste;  as  in  a  stern  subject 
treated  in  a  florid  style;  an  over-dressed 
woman  at  a  supper  of  old  friends;  or  a  bad 
joke  that  nobody  had  time  to  laugh  at.  This 
mixture  of  sensibility  and  coarseness  in  the 
man  was  very  curious;  and  I  for  one  cannot 
endure  (for  example)  his  sensual  way  of 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    225 

speaking  of  dead  substances,  satin  or  marble 
or  velvet,  as  if  he  were  stroking  a  lot  of  dogs 
and  cats.  But  there  was  a  sort  of  power — or 
at  least  weight — in  his  coarseness.  His  lapses 
were  those  proper  to  the  one  good  thing  he 
really  was,  an  Irish  swashbuckler — a  fighter. 
Some  of  the  Roman  Emperors  might  have  had 
the  same  luxuriousness  and  yet  the  same 
courage.  But  the  later  decadents  were  far 
worse,  especially  the  decadent  critics,  the 
decadent  illustrators — there  were  even  deca- 
dent publishers.  And  they  utterly  lost  the 
light  and  reason  of  their  existence :  they  were 
masters  of  the  clumsy  and  the  incongruous. 
I  will  take  only  one  example.  Aubrey 
Beardsley  may  be  admired  as  an  artist  or 
no;  he  does  not  enter  into  the  scope  of  this 
book.  But  it  is  true  that  there  is  a  certain 
brief  mood,  a  certain  narrow  aspect  of  life, 
which  he  renders  to  the  imagination  rightly. 
It  is  mostly  felt  under  white,  deathly  lights  in 
Piccadilly,  with  the  black  hollow  of  heaven 
behind  shiny  hats  or  painted  faces:  a  horrible 


226    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

impression  that  all  mankind  are  masks.  This 
being  the  thing  Beardsley  could  express  (and 
the  only  thing  he  could  express),  it  is  the 
solemn  and  awful  fact  that  he  was  set 
down  to  illustrate  Malory's  Morte  d! 'Arthur. 
There  is  no  need  to  say  more;  taste,  in  the 
artist's  sense,  must  have  been  utterly  dead. 
They  might  as  well  have  employed  Burne- 
Jones  to  illustrate  Martin  Chuzzlewit.  It 
would  not  have  been  more  ludicrous  than 
putting  this  portrayer  of  evil  puppets,  with 
their  thin  lines  like  wire  and  their  small  faces 
like  perverted  children's,  to  trace  against  the 
grand  barbaric  forests  the  sin  and  the  sorrow 
of  Lancelot. 

To  return  to  the  chief  of  the  decadents,  I 
will  not  speak  of  the  end  of  the  individual 
story:  there  was  horror  and  there  was  ex- 
piation. And,  as  my  conscience  goes  at 
least,  no  man  should  say  one  word  that  could 
weaken  the  horror — or  the  pardon.  But 
there  is  one  literary  consequence  of  the  thing 
which  must  be  mentioned,  because  it  bears 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    227 

us  on  to  that  much  breezier  movement  which 
first  began  to  break  in  upon  all  this  ghastly 
idleness — I  mean  the  Socialist  Movement. 
I  do  not  mean  "De  Profundis";  I  do  not 
think  he  had  got  to  the  real  depths  when  he 
wrote  that  book.  I  mean  the  one  real  thing 
he  ever  wrote:  The  Ballad  of  Reading 
Gaol;  in  which  we  hear  a  cry  for  common 
justice  and  brotherhood  very  much  deeper, 
more  democratic  and  more  true  to  the  real 
trend  of  the  populace  to-day,  than  anything 
the  Socialists  ever  uttered  even  in  the  boldest 
pages  of  Bernard  Shaw. 

Before  we  pass  on  to  the  two  expansive 
movements  in  which  the  Victorian  Age  really 
ended,  the  accident  of  a  distinguished  artist 
is  available  for  estimating  this  somewhat  cool 
and  sad  afternoon  of  the  epoch  at  its  pur- 
est; not  in  lounging  pessimism  or  luxurious 
aberrations,  but  in  earnest  skill  and  a  high 
devotion  to  letters.  This  change  that  had 
come,  like  the  change  from  a  golden  sunset 
to  a  grey  twilight,  can  be  very  adequately 


228    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

measured  if  we  compare  the  insight  and 
intricacy  of  Meredith  with  the  insight  and  in- 
tricacy of  Mr.  Henry  James.  The  characters 
of  both  are  delicate  and  indisputable;  but  we 
must  all  have  had  a  feeling  that  the  characters 
in  Meredith  are  gods,  but  that  the  characters 
in  Henry  James  are  ghosts.  I  do  not  mean 
that  they  are  unreal:  I  believe  in  ghosts. 
So  does  Mr.  Henry  James;  he  has  written 
some  of  his  very  finest  literature  about  the 
little  habits  of  these  creatures.  He  is  in  the 
deep  sense  of  a  dishonoured  word,  a  Spiritu- 
alist if  ever  there  was  one.  But  Meredith  was 
a  materialist  as  well.  The  difference  is  that 
a  ghost  is  a  disembodied  spirit;  while  a  god 
(to  be  worth  worrying  about)  must  be  an 
embodied  spirit.  The  presence  of  soul  and 
substance  together  involves  one  of  the  two 
or  three  things  which  most  of  the  Victorians 
did  not  understand — the  thing  called  a  sacra- 
ment. It  is  because  he  had  a  natural  affinity 
for  this  mystical  materialism  that  Meredith, 
in  spite  of  his  affectations,  is  a  poet:  and, 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    229 

in  spite  of  his  Victorian  Agnosticism  (or 
ignorance)  is  a  pious  Pagan  and  not  a  mere 
Pantheist.  Mr.  Henry  James  is  at  the  other 
extreme.  His  thrill  is  not  so  much  in  symbol 
or  mysterious  emblem  as  in  the  absence  of 
interventions  and  protections  between  mind 
and  mind.  It  is  not  mystery:  it  is  rather  a 
sort  of  terror  at  knowing  too  much.  He  lives 
in  glass  houses;  he  is  akin  to  Maeterlinck  in  a 
feeling  of  the  nakedness  of  souls.  None  of 
the  Meredithian  things,  wind  or  wine  or  sex 
or  stark  nonsense,  ever  gets  between  Mr. 
James  and  his  prey.  But  the  thing  is  a  defi- 
ciency as  well  as  a  talent:  we  cannot  but  ad- 
mire the  figures  that  walk  about  in  his  after- 
noon drawing-rooms;  but  we  have  a  certain 
sense  that  they  are  figures  that  have  no  faces. 
For  the  rest,  he  is  most  widely  known,  or 
perhaps  only  most  widely  chaffed,  because  of 
a  literary  style  that  lends  itself  to  parody  and 
is  a  glorious  feast  for  Mr.  Max  Beerbohm.  It 
may  be  called  The  Hampered,  or  Obstacle 
Race  Style,  in  which  one  continually  trips 


230    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

over  commas  and  relative  clauses;  and  where 
the  sense  has  to  be  perpetually  qualified  lest 
it  should  mean  too  much.  But  such  satire, 
however  friendly,  is  in  some  sense  unfair  to 
him;  because  it  leaves  out  his  sense  of  general 
artistic  design,  which  is  not  only  high,  but 
bold.  This  appears,  I  think,  most  strongly 
in  his  short  stories;  in  his  long  novels  the 
reader  (or  at  least  one  reader)  does  get  rather 
tired  of  everybody  treating  everybody  else 
in  a  manner  which  in  real  life  would  be  an 
impossible  intellectual  strain.  But  in  his 
short  studies  there  is  the  unanswerable  thing 
called  real  originality;  especially  in  the  very 
shape  and  point  of  the  tale.  It  may  sound 
odd  to  compare  him  to  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling: 
but  he  is  like  Kipling  and  also  like  Wells  in 
this  practical  sense:  that  no  one  ever  wrote 
a  story  at  all  like  the  Mark  of  the  Beast;  no 
one  ever  wrote  a  story  at  all  like  A  Kink  in 
Space:  and  in  the  same  sense  no  one  ever 
wrote  a  story  like  The  Great  Good  Place.  It  is 
alone  in  order  and  species;  and  it  is  masterly. 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    231 

He  struck  his  deepest  note  in  that  terrible 
story,  The  Turn  of  the  Screw;  and  though 
there  is  in  the  heart  of  that  horror  a  truth  of 
repentance  and  religion,  it  is  again  notable  of 
the  Victorian  writers  that  the  only  super- 
natural note  they  can  strike  assuredly  is  the 
tragic  and  almost  the  diabolic.  Only  Mr. 
Max  Beerbohm  has  been  able  to  imagine  Mr. 
Henry  James  writing  about  Christmas. 

Now  upon  this  interregnum,  this  cold  and 
brilliant  waiting-room  which  was  Henry 
James  at  its  highest  and  Wilde  at  its  worst, 
there  broke  in  two  positive  movements, 
largely  honest  though  essentially  unhistoric 
and  profane,  which  were  destined  to  crack  up 
the  old  Victorian  solidity  past  repair.  The 
first  was  Bernard  Shaw  and  the  Socialists: 
the  second  was  Rudyard  Kipling  and  the 
Imperialists.  I  take  the  Socialists  first  not 
because  they  necessarily  came  so  in  order  of 
time,  but  because  they  were  less  the  note 
upon  which  the  epoch  actually  ended. 

William  Morris,  of  whom  we  have  already 


232    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

spoken,  may  be  said  to  introduce  the  Social- 
ists, but  rather  in  a  social  sense  than  a  phil- 
osophical. He  was  their  friend,  and  in  a  sort 
of  political  way,  their  father;  but  he  was  not 
their  founder,  for  he  would  not  have  believed 
a  word  of  what  they  ultimately  came  to  say. 
Nor  is  this  the  conventional  notion  of  the 
old  man  not  keeping  pace  with  the  audacity 
of  the  young.  Morris  would  have  been  dis- 
gusted not  with  the  wildness,  but  the  tame- 
ness  of  our  tidy  Fabians.  He  was  not  a 
Socialist,  but  he  was  a  Revolutionist;  he 
didn't  know  much  more  about  what  he  was; 
but  he  knew  that.  In  this  way,  being  a  full- 
blooded  fellow,  he  rather  repeats  the  genial 
sulkiness  of  Dickens.  And  if  we  take  this 
fact  about  him  first,  we  shall  find  it  a  key 
to  the  whole  movement  of  this  time.  For 
the  one  dominating  truth  which  overshadows 
everything  else  at  this  point  is  a  political  and 
economic  one.  The  Industrial  System,  run 
by  a  small  class  of  Capitalists  on  a  theory  of 
competitive  contract,  had  been  quite  honestly 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    233 

established  by  the  early  Victorians  and  was 
one  of  the  primary  beliefs  of  Victorianism. 
The  Industrial  System,  so  run,  had  become 
another  name  for  hell.  By  Morris's  time  and 
ever  since,  England  has  been  divided  into 
three  classes:  Knaves,  Fools,  and  Revolu- 
tionists. 

History  is  full  of  forgotten  controversies; 
and  those  who  speak  of  Socialism  now  have 
nearly  all  forgotten  that  for  some  time  it  was 
an  almost  equal  fight  between  Socialism  and 
Anarchism  for  the  leadership  of  the  exodus 
from  Capitalism.  It  is  here  that  Herbert 
Spencer  comes  in  logically,  though  not  chro- 
nologically; also  that  much  more  interesting 
man,  Auberon  Herbert.  Spencer  has  no 
special  place  as  a  man  of  letters;  and  a  vastly 
exaggerated  place  as  a  philosopher.  His  real 
importance  was  that  he  was  very  nearly  an 
Anarchist.  The  indefinable  greatness  there 
is  about  him  after  all,  hi  spite  of  the  silliest 
and  smuggest  limitations,  is  in  a  certain 
consistency  and  completeness  from  his  own 


234    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

point  of  view.  There  is  something  mediaeval, 
and  therefore  manful,  about  writing  a  book 
about  everything  in  the  world.  Now  this 
simplicity  expressed  itself  in  politics  in  carry- 
ing the  Victorian  worship  of  liberty  to  the 
most  ridiculous  lengths;  almost  to  the  length 
of  voluntary  taxes  and  voluntary  insurance 
against  murder.  He  tried,  in  short,  to  solve 
the  problem  of  the  State  by  eliminating 
the  State  from  it.  He  was  resisted  in  this  by 
the  powerful  good  sense  of  Huxley;  but  his 
books  became  sacred  books  for  a  rising 
generation  of  rather  bewildered  rebels,  who 
thought  we  might  perhaps  get  out  of  the 
mess  if  everybody  did  as  he  liked. 

Thus  the  Anarchists  and  Socialists  fought 
a  battle  over  the  death-bed  of  Victorian  In- 
dustrialism; in  which  the  Socialists  (that  is, 
those  who  stood  for  increasing  instead  of 
diminishing  the  power  of  Government)  won 
a  complete  victory  and  have  almost  extermi- 
nated their  enemy.  The  Anarchist  one  meets 
here  and  there  nowadays  is  a  sad  sight;  he  is 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    235 

disappointed  with  the  future,  as  well  as  with 
the  past. 

This  victory  of  the  Socialists  was  largely  a 
literary  victory;  because  it  was  effected  and 
popularised  not  only  by  a  wit,  but  by  a  sin- 
cere wit;  and  one  who  had  the  same  sort  of 
militant  lucidity  that  Huxley  had  shown  in 
the  last  generation  and  Voltaire  in  the  last 
century.  A  young  Irish  journalist,  impatient 
of  the  impoverished  Protestantism  and  Lib- 
eralism to  which  he  had  been  bred,  came 
out  as  the  champion  of  Socialism  not  as  a 
matter  of  sentiment,  but  as  a  matter  of  com- 
mon sense.  The  primary  position  of  Bernard 
Shaw  towards  the  Victorian  Age  may  be 
roughly  summarised  thus:  the  typical  Vic- 
torian said  coolly:  "Our  system  may  not  be 
a  perfect  system,  but  it  works."  Bernard 
Shaw  replied,  even  more  coolly:  "It  may  be 
a  perfect  system,  for  all  I  know  or  care.  But 
it  does  not  work."  He  and  a  society  called 
the  Fabians,  which  once  exercised  consider- 
able influence,  followed  this  shrewd  and  sound 


236    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

strategic  hint  to  avoid  mere  emotional  attack 
on  the  cruelty  of  Capitalism;  and  to  concen- 
trate on  its  clumsiness,  its  ludicrous  incapa- 
city to  do  its  own  work.  This  campaign  suc- 
ceeded, in  the  sense  that  while  (in  the  educated 
world)  it  was  the  Socialist  who  looked  the 
fool  at  the  beginning  of  that  campaign,  it  is 
the  Anti-Socialist  who  looks  the  fool  at  the 
end  of  it.  But  while  it  won  the  educated 
classes  it  lost  the  populace  for  ever.  It  dried 
up  those  springs  of  blood  and  tears  out  of 
which  all  revolt  must  come  if  it  is  to  be  any- 
thing but  bureaucratic  readjustment.  We 
began  this  book  with  the  fires  of  the  French 
Revolution  still  burning,  but  burning  low. 
Bernard  Shaw  was  honestly  in  revolt  in  his 
own  way:  but  it  was  Bernard  Shaw  who  trod 
out  the  last  ember  of  the  Great  Revolution. 
Bernard  Shaw  proceeded  to  apply  to  many 
other  things  the  same  sort  of  hilarious  realism 
which  he  thus  successfully  applied  to  the 
industrial  problem.  He  also  enjoyed  giving 
people  a  piece  of  his  mind;  but  a  piece  of  his 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    237 

mind  was  a  more  appetising  and  less  raw- 
looking  object  than  a  piece  of  Hardy's.  There 
were  many  modes  of  revolt  growing  all  around 
him;  Shaw  supported  them — and  supplanted 
them.  Many  were  pitting  the  realism  of  war 
against  the  romance  of  war:  they  succeeded  in 
making  the  fight  dreary  and  repulsive,  but  the 
book  dreary  and  repulsive  too.  Shaw,  in 
Arms  and  the  Man,  did  manage  to  make  war 
funny  as  well  as  frightful.  Many  were  ques- 
tioning the  right  of  revenge  or  punishment; 
but  they  wrote  then*  books  in  such  a  way  that 
the  reader  was  ready  to  release  all  mankind 
if  he  might  revenge  himself  on  the  author. 
Shaw,  in  Captain  Brassbound's  Conversion, 
really  showed  at  its  best  the  merry  mercy  of 
the  pagan;  that  beautiful  human  nature  that 
can  neither  rise  to  penance  nor  sink  to  revenge. 
Many  had  proved  that  even  the  most  inde- 
pendent incomes  drank  blood  out  of  the  veins 
of  the  oppressed:  but  they  wrote  it  in  such  a 
style  that  their  readers  knew  more  about 
depression  than  oppression.  In  Widowers* 


238    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

Houses  Shaw  very  nearly  (but  not  quite) 
succeeded  in  making  a  farce  out  of  statistics. 
And  the  ultimate  utility  of  his  brilliant 
interruption  can  best  be  expressed  in  the 
very  title  of  that  play.  When  ages  of  essen- 
tial European  ethics  have  said  "widows' 
houses,"  it  suddenly  occurs  to  him  to  say 
"but  what  about  widowers'  houses?"  There 
is  a  sort  of  insane  equity  about  it  which  was 
what  Bernard  Shaw  had  the  power  to  give, 
and  gave. 

Out  of  the  same  social  ferment  arose  a 
man  of  equally  unquestionable  genius,  Mr. 
H.  G.  Wells.  His  first  importance  was  that 
he  wrote  great  adventure  stories  in  the  new 
world  the  men  of  science  had  discovered. 
He  walked  on  a  round  slippery  world  as  boldly 
as  Ulysses  or  Tom  Jones  had  worked  on  a 
flat  one.  Cyrano  de  Bergerac  or  Baron 
Munchausen,  or  other  typical  men  of  science, 
had  treated  the  moon  as  a  mere  flat  silver 
mirror  in  which  Man  saw  his  own  image — the 
Man  in  the  Moon.  Wells  treated  the  moon 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    239 

as  a  globe,  like  our  own;  bringing  forth 
monsters  as  moonish  as  we  are  earthy.  The 
exquisitely  penetrating  political  and  social 
satire  he  afterwards  wrote  belongs  to  an  age 
later  than  the  Victorian.  But  because,  even 
from  the  beginning,  his  whole  trend  was 
Socialist,  it  is  right  to  place  him  here. 

While  the  old  Victorian  ideas  were  being 
disturbed  by  an  increasing  torture  at  home, 
they  were  also  intoxicated  by  a  new  romance 
from  abroad.  It  did  not  come  from  Italy 
with  Rossetti  and  Browning,  or  from  Persia 
with  Fitzgerald:  but  it  came  from  countries 
as  remote,  countries  which  were  (as  the  simple 
phrase  of  that  period  ran)  "painted  red"  on 
the  map.  It  was  an  attempt  to  reform 
England  through  the  newer  nations;  by  the 
criticism  of  the  forgotten  colonies,  rather 
than  of  the  forgotten  classes.  Both  Socialism 
and  Imperialism  were  utterly  alien  to  the 
Victorian  idea.  From  the  point  of  view  of  a 
Victorian  aristocrat  like  Palmerston,  Social- 
ism would  be  the  cheek  of  gutter  snipes; 


240    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

Imperialism  would  be  the  intrusion  of  cads. 
But  cads  are  not  alone  concerned. 

Broadly,  the  phase  in  which  the  Victorian 
epoch  closed  was  what  can  only  be  called 
the  Imperialist  phase.  Between  that  and  us 
stands  a  very  individual  artist  who  must 
nevertheless  be  connected  with  that  phase. 
As  I  said  at  the  beginning,  Macaulay  (or, 
rather,  the  mind  Macaulay  shared  with  most 
of  his  powerful  middle  class)  remains  as  a 
sort  of  pavement  or  flat  foundation  under  all 
the  Victorians.  They  discussed  the  dogmas 
rather  than  denied  them.  Now  one  of  the 
dogmas  of  Macaulay  was  the  dogma  of 
progress.  A  fair  statement  of  the  truth  in  it 
is  not  really  so  hard.  Investigation  of  any- 
thing naturally  takes  some  little  tune.  It 
takes  some  time  to  sort  letters  so  as  to  find 
a  letter:  it  takes  some  time  to  test  a  gas- 
bracket so  as  to  find  the  leak;  it  takes  some 
time  to  sift  evidence  so  as  to  find  the  truth. 
Now  the  curse  that  fell  on  the  later  Victo- 
rians was  this:  that  they  began  to  value  the 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    241 

time  more  than  the  truth.  One  felt  so  secre- 
tarial when  sorting  letters  that  one  never 
found  the  letter;  one  felt  so  scientific  in 
explaining  gas  that  one  never  found  the  leak; 
and  one  felt  so  judicial,  so  impartial,  in  weigh- 
ing evidence  that  one  had  to  be  bribed  to 
come  to  any  conclusion  at  all.  This  was  the 
last  note  of  the  Victorians:  procrastination 
was  called  progress. 

Now  if  we  look  for  the  worst  fruits  of  this 
fallacy  we  shall  find  them  in  historical  criti- 
cism. There  is  a  curious  habit  of  treating  any 
one  who  comes  before  a  strong  movement  as 
the  "forerunner"  of  that  movement.  That 
is,  he  is  treated  as  a  sort  of  slave  running  in 
advance  of  a  great  army.  Obviously,  the 
analogy  really  arises  from  St.  John  the  Bap- 
tist, for  whom  the  phrase  "forerunner"  was 
rather  peculiarly  invented.  Equally  ob- 
viously, such  a  phrase  only  applies  to  an 
alleged  or  real  divine  event:  otherwise  the 
forerunner  would  be  a  founder.  Unless  Jesus 
had  been  the  Baptist's  God,  He  would  simply 
have  been  his  disciple. 


242    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

Nevertheless  the  fallacy  of  the  "fore- 
runner" has  been  largely  used  in  literature. 
Thus  men  will  call  a  universal  satirist  like 
Langland  a  "morning  star  of  the  Reforma- 
tion," or  some  such  rubbish;  whereas  the 
Reformation  was  not  larger,  but  much  smaller 
than  Langland.  It  was  simply  the  victory 
of  one  class  of  his  foes,  the  greedy  merchants, 
over  another  class  of  his  foes,  the  lazy  abbots. 
In  real  history  this  constantly  occurs;  that 
some  small  movement  happens  to  favour  one 
of  the  million  things  suggested  by  some  great 
man;  whereupon  the  great  man  is  turned  into 
the  running  slave  of  the  small  movement. 
Thus  certain  sectarian  movements  borrowed 
the  sensationalism  without  the  sacramental- 
ism  of  Wesley.  Thus  certain  groups  of  de- 
cadents found  it  easier  to  imitate  De  Quin- 
cey's  opium  than  his  eloquence.  Unless  we 
grasp  this  plain  common  sense  (that  you  or  I 
are  not  responsible  for  what  some  ridiculous 
sect  a  hundred  years  hence  may  choose  to  do 
with  what  we  say)  the  peculiar  position  of 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    243 

Stevenson  in  later  Victorian  letters  cannot  be- 
gin to  be  understood.  For  he  was  a  very  uni- 
versal man;  and  talked  some  sense  not  only 
on  every  subject,  but,  so  far  as  it  is  logically 
possible,  in  every  sense.  But  the  glaring  de- 
ficiencies of  the  Victorian  compromise  had  by 
that  time  begun  to  gape  so  wide  that  he  was 
forced,  by  mere  freedom  of  philosophy  and 
fancy,  to  urge  the  neglected  things.  And  yet 
this  very  urgency  certainly  brought  on  an 
opposite  fever,  which  he  would  not  have 
liked  if  he  had  lived  to  understand  it.  He 
liked  Kipling,  though  with  many  healthy 
hesitations;  but  he  would  not  have  liked  the 
triumph  of  Kipling:  which  was  the  success 
of  the  politician  and  the  failure  of  the  poet. 
Yet  when  we  look  back  up  the  false  perspec- 
tive of  time,  Stevenson  does  seem  in  a  sense 
to  have  prepared  that  imperial  and  downward 
path. 

I  shall  not  talk  here,  any  more  than  any- 
where else  in  this  book,  about  the  "sedulous 
ape"  business.  No  man  ever  wrote  as  well 


244    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

as  Stevenson  who  cared  only  about  writing. 
Yet  there  is  a  sense,  though  a  misleading  one, 
in  which  his  original  inspirations  were  artistic 
rather  than  purely  philosophical.  To  put  the 
point  in  that  curt  covenanting  way  which 
he  himself  could  sometimes  command,  he 
thought  it  immoral  to  neglect  romance.  The 
whole  of  his  real  position  was  expressed  in 
that  phrase  of  one  of  his  letters  "our  civilisa- 
tion is  a  dingy  ungentlemanly  business:  it 
drops  so  much  out  of  a  man."  On  the  whole 
he  concluded  that  what  had  been  dropped  out 
of  the  man  was  the  boy.  He  pursued  pirates 
as  Defoe  would  have  fled  from  them;  and 
summed  up  his  simplest  emotions  in  that 
touching  cri  de  cceur  "shall  we  never  shed 
blood?"  He  did  for  the  penny  dreadful 
what  Coleridge  had  done  for  the  penny 
ballad.  He  proved  that,  because  it  was 
really  human,  it  could  really  rise  as  near  to 
heaven  as  human  nature  could  take  it.  If 
Thackeray  is  our  youth,  Stevenson  is  our 
boyhood:  and  though  this  is  not  the  most 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    245 

artistic  thing  in  him,  it  is  the  most  important 
thing  in  the  history  of  Victorian  art.  All  the 
other  fine  things  he  did  were,  for  curious  rea- 
sons, remote  from  the  current  of  his  age. 
For  instance,  he  had  the  good  as  well  as  the 
bad  of  coming  from  a  Scotch  Calvinist's 
house.  No  man  in  that  age  had  so  healthy 
an  instinct  for  the  actuality  of  positive  evil. 
In  The  Master  of  Ballantrae  he  did  prove 
with  a  pen  of  steel,  that  the  Devil  is  a  gentle- 
man— but  is  none  the  less  the  Devil.  It  is 
also  characteristic  of  him  (and  of  the  revolt 
from  Victorian  respectability  in  general) 
that  his  most  blood-and-thunder  sensational 
tale  is  also  that  which  contains  his  most  inti- 
mate and  bitter  truth.  Dr.  Jekyll  and  Mr. 
Hyde  is  a  double  triumph;  it  has  the  outside 
excitement  that  belongs  to  Conan  Doyle  with 
the  inside  excitement  that  belongs  to  Henry 
James.  Alas,  it  is  equally  characteristic  of 
the  Victorian  time  that  while  nearly  every 
Englishman  has  enjoyed  the  anecdote,  hardly 
one  Englishman  has  seen  the  joke — I  mean 


246    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

the  point.  You  will  find  twenty  allusions  to 
Jekylland  Hyde  in  a  day's  newspaper  reading. 
You  will  also  find  that  all  such  allusions 
suppose  the  two  personalities  to  be  equal, 
neither  caring  for  the  other.  Or  more  roughly, 
they  think  the  book  means  that  man  can  be 
cloven  into  two  creatures,  good  and  evil.  The 
whole  stab  of  the  story  is  that  man  can't: 
because  while  evil  does  not  care  for  good,  good 
must  care  for  evil.  Or,  in  other  words,  man 
cannot  escape  from  God,  because  good  is  the 
God  in  man;  and  insists  on  omniscience. 
This  point,  which  is  good  psychology  and  also 
good  theology  and  also  good  art,  has  missed 
its  main  intention  merely  because  it  was  also 
good  story-telling. 

If  the  rather  vague  Victorian  public  did 
not  appreciate  the  deep  and  even  tragic  ethics 
with  which  Stevenson  was  concerned,  still 
less  were  they  of  a  sort  to  appreciate  the 
French  finish  and  fastidiousness  of  his  style; 
in  which  he  seemed  to  pick  the  right  word  up 
on  the  point  of  his  pen,  like  a  man  playing 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    247 

spillikins.  But  that  style  also  had  a  quality 
that  could  be  felt;  it  had  a  military  edge  to 
it,  an  odes;  and  there  was  a  kind  of  swords- 
manship about  it.  Thus  all  the  circumstances 
led,  not  so  much  to  the  narrowing  of  Steven- 
son to  the  romance  of  the  fighting  spirit;  but 
the  narrowing  of  his  influence  to  that  ro- 
mance. He  had  a  great  many  other  things 
to  say;  but  this  was  what  we  were  willing 
to  hear:  a  reaction  against  the  gross  con- 
tempt for  soldiering  which  had  really  given 
a  certain  Chinese  deadness  to  the  Victorians. 
Yet  another  circumstance  thrust  him  down 
the  same  path;  and  in  a  manner  not  wholly 
fortunate.  The  fact  that  he  was  a  sick  man 
immeasurably  increases  the  credit  to  his 
manhood  in  preaching  a  sane  levity  and  pug- 
nacious optimism.  But  it  also  forbade  him 
full  familiarity  with  the  actualities  of  sport, 
war,  or  comradeship :  and  here  and  there  his 
note  is  false  in  these  matters,  and  reminds  one 
(though  very  remotely)  of  the  mere  provin- 
cial bully  that  Henley  sometimes  sank  to  be. 


248    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

For  Stevenson  had  at  his  elbow  a  friend,  an 
invalid  like  himself,  a  man  of  courage  and 
stoicism  like  himself;  but  a  man  in  whom 
everything  that  Stevenson  made  delicate  and 
rational  became  unbalanced  and  blind.  The 
difference  is,  moreover,  that  Stevenson  was 
quite  right  in  claiming  that  he  could  treat  his 
limitation  as  an  accident;  that  his  medicines 
"did  not  colour  his  life."  His  life  was  really 
coloured  out  of  a  shilling  paint-box,  like  his 
toy- theatre:  such  high  spirits  as  he  had  are 
the  key  to  him:  his  sufferings  are  not  the  key 
to  him.  But  Henley's  sufferings  are  the  key 
to  Henley;  much  must  be  excused  him,  and 
there  is  much  to  be  excused.  The  result  was 
that  while  there  was  always  a  certain  dainty 
equity  about  Stevenson's  judgments,  even 
when  he  was  wrong,  Henley  seemed  to  think 
that  on  the  right  side  the  wronger  you  were 
the  better.  There  was  much  that  was  femi- 
nine in  him;  and  he  is  most  understandable 
when  surprised  in  those  little  solitary  poems 
which  speak  of  emotions  mellowed,  of  sunset 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    249 

and  a  quiet  end.  Henley  hurled  himself  into 
the  new  fashion  of  praising  Colonial  adven- 
ture at  the  expense  both  of  the  Christian  and 
the  republican  traditions;  but  the  sentiment 
did  not  spread  widely  until  the  note  was 
struck  outside  England  in  one  of  the  con- 
quered countries;  and  a  writer  of  Anglo- 
Indian  short  stories  showed  the  stamp  of  the 
thing  called  genius;  that  indefinable,  danger- 
ous and  often  temporary  thing. 

For  it  is  really  impossible  to  criticise 
Rudyard  Kipling  as  part  of  Victorian  litera- 
ture, because  he  is  the  end  of  such  literature. 
He  has  many  other  powerful  elements;  an 
Indian  element,  which  makes  him  exquisitely 
sympathetic  with  the  Indian;  a  vague  Jingo 
influence  which  makes  him  sympathetic  with 
the  man  that  crushes  the  Indian;  a  vague 
journalistic  sympathy  with  the  men  that 
misrepresent  everything  that  has  happened 
to  the  Indian;  but  of  the  Victorian  virtues, 
nothing. 

All  that  was  right  or  wrong  in  Kipling  was 


250    VICTORIAN  AGE  IN  LITERATURE 

expressed  in  the  final  convulsion  that  he 
almost  in  person  managed  to  achieve.  The 
nearest  that  any  honest  man  can  come  to 
the  thing  called  "impartiality"  is  to  confess 
that  he  is  partial.  I  therefore  confess  that 
I  think  this  last  turn  of  the  Victorian  Age  was 
an  unfortunate  turn;  much  on  the  other  side 
can  be  said,  and  I  hope  will  be  said.  But 
about  the  facts  there  can  be  no  question.  The 
Imperialism  of  Kipling  was  equally  remote 
from  the  Victorian  caution  and  the  Victorian 
idealism :  and  our  subject  does  quite  seriously 
end  here.  The  world  was  full  of  the  trampling 
of  totally  new  forces,  gold  was  sighted  from 
far  in  a  sort  of  cynical  romanticism:  the 
guns  opened  across  Africa;  and  the  great 
queen  died. 

***** 

Of  what  will  now  be  the  future  of  so  sepa- 
rate and  almost  secretive  an  adventure  of  the 
English,  the  present  writer  will  not  permit 
himself,  even  for  an  instant,  to  prophesy. 
The  Victorian  Age  made  one  or  two  mistakes, 


BREAK-UP  OF  THE  COMPROMISE    251 

but  they  were  mistakes  that  were  really 
useful;  that  is,  mistakes  that  were  really  mis- 
taken. They  thought  that  commerce  out- 
side a  country  must  extend  peace:  it  has 
certainly  often  extended  war.  They  thought 
that  commerce  inside  a  country  must  cer- 
tainly promote  prosperity;  it  has  largely 
promoted  poverty.  But  for  them  these  were 
experiments;  for  us  they  ought  to  be  lessons. 
If  we  continue  the  capitalist  use  of  the  popu- 
lace— if  we  continue  the  capitalist  use  of 
external  arms,  it  will  lie  heavy  on  the  living. 
The  dishonour  will  not  be  on  the  dead. 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

APTEK  having  surveyed  the  immense  field  presented  in  such 
a  volume  as  Mr.  George  Mair's  Modem  English  Literature  in 
this  series,  or,  more  fully,  in  the  Cambridge  History  of  Modern 
Literature,  the  later  volume  of  Chambers'  English  Literature, 
Mr.  Gosse's  History  of  Modern  English  Literature,  or  Henry 
Morley's  English  Literature  in  the  Reign  of  Victoria,  the  wise 
reader  will  choose  some  portion  for  closer  study,  and  will  go 
straight  to  the  originals  before  he  has  any  further  traffic  with 
critics  or  commentators,  however  able. 

He  will  then  need  the  aid  of  fuller  biographies.  Some 
Victorian  Lives  are  already  classic,  or  nearly  so,  among  them 
Sir  G.  Trevelyan's  Macaulay,  Forster's  Dickens,  Mrs.  Gaskell's 
Charlotte  Bronte,  Froude's  Carlyle,  and  Sir  E.  T.  Cook's 
Ruskin.  With  these  may  be  ranged  the  great  Dictionary  of 
National  Biography.  The  "English  Men  of  Letters"  Series 
includes  H.  D.  TrailPs  Coleridge,  Ainger's  Lamb,  Trollope's 
Thackeray,  Leslie  Stephen's  George  Eliot,  Herbert  Paul's 
Matthew  Arnold,  Sir  A.  Lyall's  Tennyson,  G.  K.  Chesterton's 
Robert  Browning,  and  A.  C.  Benson's  Fitzgerald.  At  least 
two  autobiographies  must  be  named,  those  of  Herbert  Spencer 
and  John  Stuart  Mill,  and,  as  antidote  to  Newman's  Apologia. 
the  gay  self-revelations  of  Borrow,  and  Jefferies"  Story  of  My 
Heart.  Other  considerable  volumes  are  W.  J.  Cross's  George 
Eliot,  Lionel  Johnson's  Art  of  Thomas  Hardy,  Mr.  W.  M. 
Rossetti's  Dante  G.  Rossetti,  Colvin's  R.  L.  Stevenson,  3.  W. 
Mackail's  William  Morris,  Holman  Hunt's  Pre-Raphaelite 
Brotherhood,  Sir  Leslie  Stephen's  The  Utilitarians,  Buxton 
Forman's  Our  Living  Poets,  Edward  Thomas's  Swinburne, 
Monypenny's  Disraeli,  Dawson's  Victorian  Novelists,  and 
Stedinan's  Victorian  Poets.  The  "Everyman"  Short  Bio- 
graphical Dictionary  of  English  Literature  is  useful  for  dates. 

The  latter  half  of  the  second  volume  of  Mr.  F.  A.  Mumby's 
Letters  of  Literary  Men  is  devoted  to  the  Victorian  Age. 
There  are  fuller  collections  of  the  Letters  of  Leigh  Hunt, 
253 


254         BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 

Thackeray,  Dickens,  the  Brownings,  Fitzgerald,  Charles 
Kingsley,  Matthew  Arnold,  and  more  recently  the  Letters  of 
George  Meredith,  edited  by  his  son. 

Among  the  important  critical  writers  of  the  period,  Matthew 
Arnold  (Essays  in  Criticism,  Study  of  Celtic  Literature,  etc.) 
stands  easily  first.  Others  are  John,  now  Lord,  Morley  (Stud- 
ies in  Literature,  etc.),  Augustine  Birrell  (Obiter  Dicta,  Essays'), 
W.  E.  Henley  (Views  and  Reviews),  J.  Addington  Symonds 
(Essays),  J.  Churton  Collins,  Richard  Garnett,  Stopford  A. 
Brooke,  George  E.  B.  Saintsbury  (History  of  Criticism),  R.  H. 
Button  (Contemporary  Thought),  J.  M.  Robertson  (Modern 
Humanists,  Buckle,  etc.),  Frederic  Harrison  (The  Choice  of 
Books,  etc.),  Andrew  Lang,  Walter  Bagehot,  Edmund  Gosse, 
Prof.  Dowden,  Sir  Walter  Raleigh,  and  Sir  A.  T.  Quiller 
Couch. 


INDEX 


/ESTHETES,    the,   and    Decadents, 

218-87 

Arnold,  Matthew,  73-79,  87 
Austen,  Jane,  92,  105,  109 

Bentham,  36 

Blake,  20 

Borrow,  151 

Bronte,  Charlotte,  92,  105,  110-14 

,  Emily,  113 

Browning,  Elizabeth  B.,  176-82 

,  R.,  40-41,  159,  162-«3 

Byron,  22 

Carlyle,  40.  49-62,  158 
Carroll,  Lewis,  153 
Cobbett,  16-17,  88,  151 
Coleridge,  20 
Collins,  Wilkie,  130, 132 

Darwin,  38,  206-7,  209 

De  Quincey,  23-25,  65 

Dickens,  40,  79-89,  100,  106,  119- 

23,  129,  131 
Disraeli,  42,  135 

Eliot,  George,  92,  103-9,  157 

Faber,  46 

Fitzgerald,  192-95 

French   Revolution,   Influence   of, 

13-21 
Froude,  60,  62 

Gaskell,  Mrs..  94 
Gilbert,  154 

Hardy,  Thomas,  138-39,  143-45 
Iluzlitt,  23 


Henley,  W.  E.,  247-48 
Hood,  Thomas,  25-27 
Hughes,  Tom,  73 
Humour,  Victorian,  152-55 
Hunt,  Leigh,  23 
Huxley,  39-40,  205 

Imperialism,  60,  239 
James,  Henry,  228-81 

Keats,  20 

Keble,  45 

Kingsley,  40,  59,  64,  72,  134-35 

Kipling,  R.,  60,  249-50 

Lamb,  23 
Landor,  23 
Lear,  Edward,  153 
Literary    temperament,    the    Eng- 
lish, 13-16 
Lytton,  Bulwer,  135-87 

Macaulay,  28-86,  55 
Macdonald,  George,  152 
Maurice,  F.  D.,  40,  73 
Melbourne,  Lord,  42 
Meredith,  George,  138-49,  228 
Mill,  J.  S.,  36-37,  55 
Morris,  Wm.,  196-200,  232 

Newman,  38,  40,  45-48,  78,  159 
Novel,  The  Modern,  90-99 

Oliphant,  Mrs.,  116-17 

"Ouida,"  117 

Oxford  Movement,  42-45 


255 


256 


INDEX 


Pater,  Walter,  69-71 
Patmore,  48,  201-2 
Pre-Raphaelite  School,  68,  72 

Reade,  Charles,  134 

Rossetti,  D.  G.  and  C.,  71,  188-91 

Ruskin,  40,  62-8,  70,  158 

Science,  Victorian,  208-12 
Shaw,  G.  B.,  60,  235-38 
Shelley,  22-23 
Shorthouse,  149-50 
Socialism,  60.  67,   122,  198,  227, 
231-39     „ 


Spencer,  Herbert,  75,  238-84 
Stevenson,  R.  L.,  243-49 
Swinburne,  69,  159,  181-88 

Tennyson,  40,  64,  160-69 
Thackeray,  100,  110,  123-30,  158 
Thompson,  Francis,  48,  201,  202 
Trollope,  Anthony,  130,  132-33 

Watson,  Wm.,  202 
Wells,  H.  G.,  238-39 
Wilde,  Oscar,  218-23 
Women,  Victorian,  91,  99, 104, 11«- 
16,  140 


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